What a legendary thread
LOL, Sounds like a woman, no matter what isnât working as expected, she will get mad anyway.
In the end she expects HA to fix the lightbulb when itâs brokenâŚ
Best thread ever!
Hey, I donât think this was the original intent of this thread, but can we not do the âHar har, women! Amirite!?â thing, please?
I am the wife and the Home Assistant half of my partnership. My husband sounds very much like some of the wives described in this thread - heâs appreciative of certain things, disinterested in others, disgruntled when things donât work as expected, and long suffering when I start on something new.
Itâs interest level, not gender folks! As others have said, youâre not going to get the lay-people interested in home automaton for the sake of it (unless theyâre already into the cool factor). Make it easy for them to use, make it solve the problems they didnât know they had, and make it reliable. Good software systems (of almost any kind) should fade into the background of their usersâ lives, not take the focus.
Cheers!
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I donât think âwifeâ has to be gender based tbh, I think the internet is generally pretty non-gender and when someone says husband/wife/partner they just mean their âsignificant otherâ.
In the same way, if you wish you can be an honorary âhusbandâ for the purposes of this thread, or you can take the word âhusbandâ to mean âholder of the SSH keyâ, or whatever you want to do, or be, itâs all good.
I think the specific comments about women being able to find something to get mad about are something most women would agree with, in the same way as most men would be happy to wear a shirt saying âI said Iâd fix it, you donât have to remind me every six monthsâ. Itâs a humorous generalisation with no ill intent (hopefully anyway!)
Thatâs why the internet is awesome, because gender, race, sexuality, religion, and all donât matter here. Youâre just whatever you type. Whether you choose to type nice things or not is a different matter.
Here there are just people who love automating their home, and their âwivesâ
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No, this was not the original intenet. That is why I asked this:
I just didnt mention the husband because I dont have one. 
The purpose of this post is to ask if I am doing something wrong with my wife or this happens in general. As I said in one of my replies, my wife loves HA. My problem was to make her interact with it. How can I do something like that? Use more buttons? Remove the switches from my house like someone already mentioned earlier (and I cried laughing) to force her?
From the replies, it looks like everyone here is in worse situation than I am. So I consider myself lucky.
It will take a lot of time and I think many different ways to interact with ha or not actually at all is the answer (I.e. automate)
After this thread, I did a straw poll of what the significant other likes the most and the least about home assistant. Generally it was stuff that just works on its own or combines a whole lot of processes together so itâs easier than just pressing a button. This is mostly via Alexa than via the app which surprised me somewhat.
Lights have certainly been the trickiest. The only time my OH turns the garage light switch off is when I put a smart solution in there! The reason for making it smart in the first place was that it was constantly being left on 
Still I suppose the ultimate goal was achieved just not as I had intended!
I think lights need to be automated the most otherwise using the light switch is still the quickest and easiest.
Iâm happy to take up the gender issues somewhere else (well, Iâm not happy exactly, but Iâm willing to get into a longer good-faith discussion about why I had a problem with the direction it went if anyoneâs genuinely interested).
In the interest of keeping this thread on track though â how do you want her to interact with it?
If you want her to tinker with it and expand the automations, thatâs probably a losing battle if she hasnât already expressed interest in doing so. As other people have said, this is your hobby, not hers. (Do you participate in all of her hobbies? Does she expect you to?)
If sheâs just not using the UI, then you need to talk to her to find out why. Maybe she finds it easier to walk over to a light switch than to pull out her phone, find the right app/bookmark, figure out where in the panel the light she wants is, and then finally toggle it (heck, sometimes I use the light switches too!) Make sure the lights she uses regularly are the easiest/quickest for her to find â donât hide them in a secondary view, even if the organization makes sense to you.
Alexa integration was the kicker for my husband â he almost never pulls up the UI, but he asks Alexa to do things all the time (even when we have to fight with her to get her to recognize the custom intents I have setup).
Automate what you can so sheâs getting the benefits without actively doing anything. For instance, I have a night time routine that locks the door and turns off all the lights. I was always the one triggering it. But then I automated it so it runs when we both have our phones plugged in after a certain time (the assumption is that that means weâre both in bed), and now it happens automatically.
But mostly, just talk to her and find out how she wants to interact with it. And if the answer is âI donât want to,â then thatâs fine too! Thatâs all my lights are on ZWave switches instead of smart plugs or light bulbs. In my view, the goal of the smart home shouldnât be being smart because itâs cool, it should be to make my familyâs life easier and more convenient, whatever that means for each family member.
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I think @natabat has the right idea, I tend to think interacting with HASS should be almost completely passive. We/our SO/ family/ dog shouldnât have to pull out a tablet or issue a command. Personally, I have very few Alexa commands, no dash buttons, tablets, etc. I love the Harmony form factor, because it squeezes intelligence into the same remote form factor that humanity has used for the last half a century, and allows for chaining all those commands that sometimes require a button press. My question is how to get at our SOâs preferences (temp, light level, music volume, etc) without getting the dreaded eyeroll
Also @carbuthn, what dog feeder are you using?
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Although I agree that home automation is at its best when itâs transparent to the user, there are certain automations that just cannot be triggered automatically - at least not reliably or without major technical spending.
So I go for second best option which is carrying out a series of actions after a manual trigger has been invoked, e.g. see my example 1. in my message above.
There is no telling when - at what time and in which cases - it needs to start, but the major benefit lies in carrying out multiple actions with one simple button push.
I have seen negative comments about this kind of automation - because itâs not âreally fully automaticâ - but they often provide equally as much value in many cases. 
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Yes and,
yes but I would make it clearer by adding, âunless your system is telepathicâ 
Of course home automation works best (by definition) when it is automatic but quite clearly some things are driven ârandomlyâ by a thought / need / desire, call it what you will.
Transparency is the ideal but there is no shame in the trigger for an automation being a human (or a dog).
In fact given the somewhat flaky state of (some) things in the home automation and IoT technology arena, sometimes it is preferable 
I just wanted it to be mentioned because Iâve taken flak in the past for proposing things like that.
Just trying to encourage people to do whatâs possible - and within their skills and budget - rather than to give up because it cannot be âfully automatedâ.
And the name Home Assistant is one of the many reasons I like to work with it
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None at the moment, Zeus got tired of waiting for it to drop more food and ate part of the feeder to get to the food.
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Awww, puppers!
FWIW, I user a Super-Feeder hooked up to a Wemo plug for my cat. I have the rule setup in the Wemo software because I was having a lot of stability issues with HA early on (mostly due to a flakey router, as it turned out) and it was a âmission criticalâ function.
Thanks for the information, I will likely end up building something much bigger.
I was thinking of using a D1 Mini Pro v2 and its timers for control and reporting to HA for notifications and monitoring.
Right now he eats when he wants too, but normally waits until he is sure that he isnât getting any left overs.
I had a wonderful win last night. My wife and I were sitting in the den. âIts to hot in here she says, can you turn on the fanâ. I looked up and noticed that the fan was just starting to turn so I pointed up. This completely amazed here. I didnât even have to tell alexa to do it. It just turned on almost telepathically.
Truth be told I have a multi sensor sitting on top of a curio cabinet where she canât see it. It monitors the temperature. When the temperature gets over 74 it turns on. When it gets below 72, it turns the fan off.
I just going to let her believe that the house can read my mind for now.
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Let me add one positive experience I had.
I have created alarms to wake up my wife every morning for work. The alarm plays some music through KODI on youtube and also speaks some TTS announcing the weather.
Last week the predefined song stopped playing (guess the owner deleted it) so I had to change the song. My wife wasnt at home and I didnt know what song she might wanted for her morning wake up, so that gave me an idea.
I created a script and an input_text. Through some templating, I managed to paste a youtube link on the frontend and play it on KODI.
Now, the song I chose is one hour of hard death metalâŚ
Sent a message and told her âhoney I made this thing where you just paste a link and the song will play every morning! You will be able to change the song any time you like!â
âWOW, thats greatâ she saidâŚ
âBabe, dont forget to change the song when you come home, or you wont wake up on a good mood tomorrowâ, I said.
âSureâ was her answer.
The next day was so funny! Guess what happened⌠Yea exactly, she never changed the song!
So the same evening she had to change it and that gentlemen was the first time she saw the MEDIA tab of HA 
She got so excited, her reaction was this:
âWTF is this? I can play songs on the TV now? And can also pause or change the volume? WOW!â
âHoney, I have this setup 3 months nowâ
I know it is not much, but my original goal is starting to work! She is now using the MEDIA tab too!
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