Sharing a slightly unusual deployment. I coordinate a therapeutic community near Kyiv where 30-40 people live for about a year while recovering from drug and alcohol addiction. Old two-storey house, no IT staff, residents run the household themselves. We put HA on a spare mini PC last winter and it stuck. What it does now:
- Wall schedule. A cheap tablet in the hall shows today’s plan (morning circle, work, groups, sport, evening circle) from a Google Calendar. Before that the plan lived on a whiteboard and got wiped by accident about once a week.
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- Sober-day counter. Each resident has a start date in a helper; a dashboard card shows days and the next milestone (30/60/90/180/365). Sounds trivial, but people check it every morning. One thing we learned: never reset it to a big red zero after a relapse, keep the previous best visible, otherwise people stop looking at it.
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- Door sensors on the medicine cabinet and the office. Not for surveillance, just a log so staff know when the cabinet was opened. Zigbee contact sensors, nothing fancy.
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- Kitchen duty rotation. A template sensor that rotates names weekly and shows who is on duty. Ends a daily argument.
Constraints that shaped it: no cloud dependencies except the calendar, everything must survive a power cut (UPS + auto-restart), and the UI has to be readable by people who have never used a dashboard. Big fonts, four cards, no menus.
- Kitchen duty rotation. A template sensor that rotates names weekly and shows who is on duty. Ends a daily argument.
If anyone runs HA in a shelter, hostel, group home or similar shared-living setup, I would like to compare notes, especially on presence detection without tracking individuals. Background on the program itself, for context (site in Ukrainian and Russian): Реабілітація наркозалежних: 5 етапів, чесно про строки