A day in the life of an automated home

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Hi All,

I’d be really keen to hear “A day in the life of my automated home” stories. I see a lot of individual intergrations that people use HA to automate their homes but I’d like to see how it all fits together. I’m sure it will give people ideas on where they can automate things they may not have thought about.

An example:

When I’m at home my alarm goes off at 7am on weekdays. I get up and go into the kitchen. A motion sensor detects that this is the first time I have entered this area today and “Wakes up the house”. This includes opening the Qmotion blinds, turning on the electric jug and disarming my Arlo cameras (except for the one at the front door which acts as my doorbell).

In winter when it is likely to still be dark outside, instead of opening the blinds, it turns on the Hue lights in the kitchen and waits for sunrise before opening the blinds. The kitchen/living area is always the right temperature because at 5am HA checks the inside temperature (from the indoor unit of my Davis weather station) and turns my AC to heat or cool if required using a Sensibo thermostat. If it’s cold the heated towel rack in the bathroom also comes on using a z-wave smart switch.

During the day , when I’m home, not much happens unless someone comes to the door in which case my Google Home devices will announce that “someone is at the front door” or it’s bin night in which case it tells me what bins I need to put out. At sunset the lights in the kitchen and living room (smart switches running Tasmota) automatically come on and when the sun is 5 degrees below the horizon the blinds will close.

If we go out or come home after sunrise the outside lights will automatically turn on and then turn off 15 minutes later (but only if they weren’t turned on previously). Of course, a lot of these automations only run if we are home.

My wife and I travel a lot for work and HA knows when we are away using NMAP presence detection. When we leave, the ARLO cameras are automatically set to Away mode and then on Thursday’s when the cleaners come, the house is automatically woken up when the camera over the front door is triggered.

I know this is pretty basic stuff and there is a lot more I can do. I’d really like to hear other peoples stories for inspiraton.

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OK. I look after my disabled Mother full time so we have a routine.

07:00 - 07:30 an alarm notification that the carer has arrived is announced on my Mothers echo dot. My phone tells me verbally the the front door has been opened. All the cameras through out the property begin motion detection and lights in the entrance hall, stairwell and my Mothers bedroom turn on.
A motion sensor in the wet room tells me unobtrusively that my Mother has been showered by the carer.
A sonic distance sensor and a separate camera tell me verbally via my phone and mycroft that my Mother is headed downstairs on her stair lift. A second notification tells me verbally that the carer has left when the front door is opened for the second time in a set period.

I have an RF button that when pressed by my Mother alerts me that she needs my assistance. Its like a panic button and all cameras go into record and all lights turn on.

Another RF button is connected to the doorbell button and alerts me to the arrival of the many electronic components I buy. All are sent to my phone either by direct connection from hassio via Ariela or via push bullet if not connected to home by VPN.

Day to day each room has a photo resistor and a PIR detector. This provides info to an automation that determines if the lights should be on and the blinds/ curtains should be open. Temp and humidity (DHT22/AM2302) are measured in each room along with a camera feed via an esp32-cam that can be manually selected if need be. Heating is controlled in this way. I quite heavily use nodemcu devices and have more that one wifi access point to build in redundancy.

I have map zones set so that I know when my Mother is at the day care centre (twice a week) and when she leaves to come home via their in house transport.

When my Mother goes up to bed the distance sensor detects the movement in the stairlift (between certain times) and turns on lights and closes the blinds/curtains as required.

When I go to bed and close my study door the lights turn off, my PC shuts off. the lights on the hall, landing and my bedroom turn on and then turn off at three minute intervals.

If I have to get up in the middle of the night to use the facilities then my bedroom light turns on at 50% with red and remains so for three mins.

Also I have some fans in each room if the climate is too humid or hot then they switch on and circulate the air. I measured the values for a while to see which work out best for our environment.

Everything I have done is based on a use case. I look for challenges to solve and Home assistant along with its integrations, components, community and the myriad of options in the wild have surpassed my requirements. Even on a very tight budget!

Edit 1 and 2 My spelling is soo bad!

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That is awesome. And I must admit it made me realize what a difference HA can make to people’s lives and peace of mind.

Thanks for sharing.

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With apologies to Lennon and McCartney

It read the news aloud, oh boy
About a luckless man who upped the grade
And though the news was rather sad
Well, I just had to laugh
I saw the photograph

He blew his hass up in a flash;
He didn’t notice that the versions changed
A crowd of people stood and stared
They’d seen this case before
Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Nerds

It played a film today, oh boy;
The English army had just won the war
A crowd of people turned away
But I just had to look
Having read the book

It loves to turn things on

Woke me up, got out of bed
It turned the coffee switch to red
Found my way downstairs and drank the cup
And looking up, it told me I was late

It found my coat and grabbed my hat
Made the bus in seconds flat
Found my way upstairs, logged the wifi
And assistant spoke and I went into a dream

It read the news aloud, oh boy
Four thousand holes in net security
And though the holes were rather small
They had to count them all
Now they know how many holes it takes to screw the net for all

It loves to turn things on

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6:30 am my lights in bedroom start to slowly turn on with my alarm, Kids bedroom lights turn on and their echos play a song to wake them up, Coffee machine turns on at 6:35 and the halway lights and kitchen under bench lights turn off while turning on the nanoleaf lights.

Kitchen lights turn on with motion and TTS over echo tells the kids its time for school, TTS over echo tells me when each child arrives at school via google location sharing.

I leave for work and every light, or appliance turns off if my wife is already at work and echos turn on guard mode. If at 9:15 no one is home the roborock vacuum starts and cleans the house,
If we arrive home after sunset outside light and livingroom light turns on, TTS over echo greets whoever arrives home, Every room has motion sensors for lights and door sensors for cinema room ect.

If I turn on the projector in cinema room and it’s below 26c the fan turns on if over 26c the aircon turns on.

TTS over echo picks a random child to have shower at 5pm and tells them when it’s bedtime.

I get into bed and tell Alexa “Goodnight” which turns off all lights and disables motion for every room until 7am.

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Very creative. I’m sure Lennon and McCartney would be happy.

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I wake up with a old schooll alarm clock, go into the kitchen/front room and if it’s dark the lights fade up. I press a button on my phone and my alerts for the day play, pollution, pollen, server alerts, weather and then finally it plays the Jupiter Broadcasting Linux headlines.
I then open my daughter’s door and her light fades on (and then off if no movement in her room for 5 minutes)
Leave house, all lights turn off.
Get home, lights turn on its it’s dark, “hey Mycroft” or a button press allows me to turn the TV on and change the channel to kids TV while I get dinner ready for my daughter.
“Hey Mycroft” or button again for bedtime dims all the lights and turns my daughters reading light on for her story. Tigger again and every thing goes back to normal lighting.
If her door opens after bedtime but before 7am the lights flash red to alert us.
If the washing has finished the led strip under the kitchen cabinets flashes green every few minutes.

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Told my wife about the flashing lights when the washing machine had finished and it looks like I have a project this weekend. :smile:

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I hope this is one of your kids. :laughing:

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I did the laundry notification and my wife doesn’t like it… Or I guess I should say that she could care less. “I don’t need lights or Alexa to tell me when the laundry is done”

My response: “well I do”

Haha

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Look Like My Turn

and

and

and

and my first project

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“I don’t need lights or Alexa to tell me when the laundry is done”

It’s like I hear my gf talking… xD The life of an engineer can be lonely.

My automations:

I recently finished a more advanced home-algorithm with Node Red, something I dreamt of since the beginning. My house has a “status”, depending on our location or state. For example, when one person in the house is sleeping, the house gets the “sleeping” status. This means that the lights are being dimmed close to the bedrooms to prevent waking them up. If everyone is sleeping, the night alarm wille be armed automatically. The night alarm only uses the door- and windowsensors and the downstairs motion sensors. This makes it possible to go to the toilet without making a mess.

When everybody is away, the house will get the status “away”. The alarm will be armed automatically, using all motion sensors in the house. And of course the door- and windowsensors. When the doorbell is used, we get a push notification containing a camera screenshot of the person standing in front of the door.

When the house has the status “home”, many things start to happen. When it gets dark, the lights automatically turn on depending on the chosen scene. I implemented scenes so it gets easier to automate events like “watching television”, which needs certain lights to decrease brightness. Normally, the lights are completely automated. Coming home turns them on, sleeping turns them off. But, if we use the hardware buttons to change the scenes manually, the program will wait for a certain long-press to take over the automation again.

When the house has the “holiday” status, it will see us as “permanently away”. It will then randomize the lights in house. I’m still exploring how far I can go with this. I’ve ideas about dimming lights suddenly for a short time so that it looks like someone’s walking in front of them and blocking the light. Can’t make it realistic enough right? Haha!

I’ve made a bunch of other stuff too. Like when it’s dark, the hall lights will turn on when the doorbell rings. But only when someone’s home.

If the alarm system is arming, but detects a door or window being open, I’ll get a message to warn me.

We use the google calendar integration to get important reminders. If it’s important enough, there’s also a push notification triggered.

I’m monitoring the solar panels on the roof. When it’s done collecting energy, I’m getting a message including the daily output (and additionally the weekly output on sunday).

With a press on the button we can play radio music through the chromecast.

I’m monitoring my 3D printer using octoprint. With home assistant I can see the progress, a livestream, power consumption, temperatures etc. When the print is done, I’m shutting the thing off after the cooling down.

I’m planning to make a climate advisory system that tells us which doors to open or close to save energy in the winter or to prevent heating in the summer.

Future plans:
I want a more reliable local person-tracker. I’m using our phone’s wifi connection to determine if we are away, home or asleep. Turning off wifi at a certain time in the evening results in us sleeping, but what if we go out late? I’m looking at a BLE beacon that we could carry around on our keychain. This way if the BLE beacon is home, but the wifi is off, I know for sure that we’re sleeping.

At this moment I’m relying on the bigtimer node to determine if it’s dark or not. Cloudy afternoons can be tricky with this method, so I’m planning on installing a few light sensors to make this system more accurate.

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