Share your automation ideas

I think my favorite “automation” is actually one of the most simple. There’s a button next to my garage door I press when leaving the house. It just shuts down all the things I want off. No lights lights left on I know the doors are locked etc

I have A LOT of automations. Some of my favorites are:

• Automatically set "house state" (morning, day, evening, night, not home, etc.") based on alarm state, time of day, last movement, etc - this state controls a lot of other automations
• Push message to my phone if outside camera detect a person when house state is "night" or "not home" (using Frigate for object detection)
• Automatically turn off lights at night or when not home. Automatically set lights to right level when home
• Push message when window has been open for more than 20 minutes.
• Push message if windows or doors are open when leaving the house or at night
• Push message with "morning update" and "evening update". Including today's weather, if I should sell some stocks as price has reached threshold, etc.

Basically, I no longer has to remember to turn on of off lights and if I forget something important in the house (such as an open window or turning on the alarm), it reminds me to do so (if it can't do it itself)

I did a few small automation for my car and the charger.

When I plug in the charger at home, it will check the current electricity prices and if below a certain threshold it will setup a plan to charge in those hours.

I also have a button I can press to make a plan depending on how many kwh I need as well as when I need it.

It will then automatically start and stop the charger based on these plans

My automations include:

• Setting the lighting mode to "night mode" based on a threshold of the outside lux level, which is changed dynamically based on the reported weather condition.
• Setting a master brightness inputnumber based on a threshold of the outside lux level, which is dynamically changed based on the reported weather condition. Every room then has it's own inputnumber which is automatically set every time the master brightness changes, and either has additional brightness added relative to the master, or brightness subtracted.
• At 7:30am some Jinja code starts setting a daylight temperature inputnumber which starts adjusting the Kelvin temperature of supported lights in the house. I'm aware that there are various integrations to do this, but they all appear to be based on the actual sun, and as a SAD sufferer I don't understand why people would want that, especially in the winter. My solution guarantees me at least 8 hours of "daylight" regardless of what the time of year is. - The code is ridiculously simple too:

 undefined

    
    {% set k_end = 5500 %} {% set k_start = 2000 %} {% set t_start =
    today_at('07:30') %} {% set t_end = today_at('10:30') %} {% set cv =
    ((now()|as_timestamp) - t_start|as_timestamp)|int %} {{ k_start +
    (cv/3.0857)|int }}


  

Then the reverse happens starting at 6pm:

 undefined

    
    {% set k_start = 5500 %} {% set k_end = 2000 %} {% set t_start =
    today_at('18:00') %} {% set t_end = today_at('21:00') %} {% set cv =
    ((now()|as_timestamp) - t_start|as_timestamp)|int %} {{ k_start -
    (cv/3.0857)|int }}


  

My other favourite automation, is something I call Music Walk, essentially when I play music on a group of speakers, as I move about the house when the occupancy of a room changes (camera through frigate, and Zigbee motion) a script is triggered which increases the volume in that room, and starts a timer for 01:30:00 and then after occupancy has been cleared, the timer is reset to 00:05:00 and when the timer finishes - it will run the script that changed the volume originally and set it to 0.1 So it feels like as I walk into rooms the music follows me there, but really it was already playing there - just quieter.

My sibling jailbroke my old Kindle and is working on combining it with a Raspberry Pi to show a calendar that syncs up with their online calendar. It's also supposed to show the weather, but that's a WIP.

For me, my favourites are definetely some light automations, namingly

• motion detectors and window sensors (where there aren't insect nets) turning on and off the lights
• adaptive lighting automations setting brightness and shade based on the time

more than that

• turning down the (usually somewhat loud) music in the bathroom when I open the window to the street
• running the vaccuum when I'm not at home
• heating automations adapting to the weather report, presence, time and user preset

my future idea is to copy a nuki opener with an esp-32.

I've enjoyed using it for a room controller for my AV distribution system. one of those perpetually unfinished work in progress projects and money-sinks.

So a few little wall mounted android things running fully kiosk browser, each one with it's own room control panel using the WallPanel add-on from HACS to get a customisable toolbarless view, card-mod for some custom CSS and a few other tweaks, also node-red running to do some logic, sequencing and handling the REST commands that are a pain to implement directly in HA. Each room panel has control over lighting, climate, TV and Audio. Each room has a TV connected to a 8x8 HDMI2.0 matrix with a selection of Nvidia Shields, TV and Sat tuners and an appleTV, along with a dedicated dashboard with weather, rain radar and camera views. This is all done in lovelace with custom navigation buttons instead of a toolbar in a simple grid layout with minimal options per page.

So when a user taps the media icon in their room, they get a list of available sources for the TV, guest rooms only have one Nvidia shield available (specifically for guest users) and the main bedrooms get their personal one. The shared living areas and theatre have access to any source so any user can pull up their dedicated shield with their content, apps and accounts.

This also means that I can push any video source to any room intelligently, so I can have a party mode that mirrors every screen, or use any form of presence detection to send a doorbell image to the nearest TV, or a surveillance feed, I just haven't implemented any of that as I dont need to yet.

The only difficulty is remotes, currently I'm using super cheap hacked OneForAll remotes with custom codes and macros, but if someone selects a source on the touch panel they have to select it again on the remote to get control, so mostly people change source with the remote as I have that set up in a macro. I despise using touch devices as a remote control. If I can get a smarter remote solution worked out I'll do it, it would require a man in the middle to process remote commands from the IR system, recognise the room it is in and the active source in that room and forward on the right commands to the matrix for distribution. possible, but a pain as I'd have to program it from scratch on an arduino or esp32, or more likely one per room.

A bunch of little things:

• when I hit the small button on my inovelli bedroom switch, it turns on my bedside tables, turns off all other lights, and closes my blinds
• when it sees my living room and bedroom tv's on at the same time, it turns off my bedroom. My damn remote triggers both tv's power when I'm in the living room
• flashing my kitchen lights if my deep freezer door is ajar
• opening my blinds in the morning automatically, and closing them at dusk.
• adaptive lighting with hue bulbs

I've got Emby tied into HA and it auto dims the lights on playback/pause if it's dark with a toggle in HA to override.

A "night mode" button that starts my white noise MPD playlist in the bedroom and sets the speaker zone/volume, turns off all the lights/decorations, turns on one bulb in the living room overhead lights to 1% (just enough to navigate around furniture), and turns the bedroom lamps on to medium brightness with a 10 minute auto-off.

Overhead lights and lamps tied into a common dimmer and can select different modes (lamps only, overhead only, both, etc) and color temps. Overhead lights are set to be proportional to the lamps to keep the light levels even (unless overridden to "Chernobyl mode" which disables the overhead light limiter).

My "TV" is just a PC connected to a large dumb monitor upstairs and a projector downstairs. Wrote a MQTT agent in Python to control turning the screen on/off, volume, and other settings. This is to allow HA to turn the screen/projector on/off .

Have more, but those are the ones I'm using this moment.

Here they are with links to the code

A two things that will run when the house is unattended.

1. An automation that turns off all lights at 11PM
2. A vacation mode that you turn on manually but switches off automatically when you arrive back home.

The vacation mode can do things like turn on more lights than you would have normally, turn on the TV or some music, etc.

In Progress, needs tweaking:
Making sure our AC only turns on when it can efficiently cool the house. Useful when we dip into the 50's for lows while it's 70's+ during the day. Basically switch the thermostat to heat only to avoid the AC coming on.

In the planning stage:
Presence sensing in our bathroom to turn the light on for my dad in the middle of the night. Can't use PIR motion detection as my dad moves very slow these days and actually defeats the PIR sensor in our hallway night light. I'm thinking mmWave is the way to go. Might try presence sensing when someone is on the toilet, turn the fan on, again, because sometimes he forgets.

Just getting started really with automations right now.

The ones I feel I get the most out of are the text to speech reminders that play in the whole house with all of the activities and chores that needs to be done.

Kids laundry days, activities, unpacking clothes, homework etc.

Reads everything from a shared Google Calender.

Automating the kids evening routines is also a good one. Cutting of the network access to TV:s and reminding them it's time to go to bed.
Always there and help them with it but it cuts down on nagging and the argumentation surrounding how long they have watched TV and so on.

Putting on their evening music on a timer, adjusting the volume, lights.

Besides that and the regular lights on/off routines in the whole house the presence simulation when we are away is also a good one.

Having problems with getting object detection working on the Yellow via Google Coral though, rumours say it's doable but no one has actually got it working so I am starting to think it's BS.

Current favorite is an automatic bathroom vent fan for when i’m in the shower.

I don't have many, I find home assistant is a tool in search of a need.

• Run the robot vacuum when I leave the house.
• When I arrive home or open the garage door after sunset, turns on the rear porch lights and then turns it off after 15 minutes. (I have a detached garage.)
• Turn on select outdoor lights at sunset.
• Turns off all outdoor lights at sunrise, so if I forget to turn off the lights around my deck they eventually do get turned off.
• I have a button near where I sit in the living room that controls all four lights in the living room.
• I have a button on my dashboard that just turns off all the lights in my house.
• I have a button near my bar that turns on multiple lights and a neon sign. I was intending to add effects and scenes around the bar too so I could press another button and have a show go off.

Iv'e been meaning to play more with the GPS geofence stuff and set up an automation with my front door alarm sensor so that when someone comes home after a set amount of time, the smart speakers will all say "Welcome home [name]" like the movie Back to the Future.

I'm really happy with the automated hallway and bathroom lights I set up with some Tuya ZY-M100s + smart dimmer switches so I can make the brightness vary with time of day. The lights automatically come on and ~95% of the time at just the right brightness too. Feels like magic.

Also tying our main kitchen lights and accent lights (under cabinet LEDs + salt lamp) into the same switch has been great since it means we actually use our accent lighting (otherwise we often wouldn't bother).

As my air conditioner bases its fan control on its own thermometer, and its readings are irrelevant, as it is positioned on the AC itself, I made an AC automation using Pyscript that manages the AC modes, temperatures, and boost based on an external thermometer.

• Exterior house lights - I have a bunch of automations around this, the most complex is that lights will turn on if one of us is away from home, but within 8km (proximity) after dark -- going to upgrade this to reference a photoresistor soon instead of sun state
• Laundry - push notification when both the washer & dryer are finished. Also controls exhaust fan. Planning to upgrade this with a motion sensor so I can detect when the washer has run but nobody has moved the wet laundry.
• Extended away - If we're going to be away for a while (eg: vacation), turn thermostat to Eco. UI control to set return date & time, when it comes out of Eco so the house is temperate when we get back. This also disables firing of some automations.
• Currently building a garage sensor, which will detect garage doors open/closed, car present/absent, motion sensor, temperature/humidity, photoresistor of ourdoors, and manual garage door open/close buttons