For me it’s not what you CAN do with HA, it’s more what CAN’T you do. HA is by far the most flexible home automation platform I’ve ever worked with and if there isn’t a component or solution pre-built for you it’s easy to build it using a myriad of methods. If you can think it up you can likely make it happen in HA.
i couldn’t agree more… I have a Crestron Controller and a Control4 controller and I couldn’t integrate all my smaller ecosystems into it without paying for additional licenses/drivers.
But sometimes the community has some very good ideas… just recently i discovered the integration with Tesla and i put that on the exit press button to unlock port charger, doors and trigger Tesla climate… it used to only open the garage door… now it does much more… the power of the sharing in the community
If you are looking for ideas you should search around the forums. The “hey what’s a good idea for automation” topic probably has a hundred different threads. I would recommend just reading the forums regularly, I get all kinds of great ideas just from reading what someone did (i.e., I recently built a fireplace log monitoring system using ESPHome based on some ideas brought up here, it was a fun project that my wife thinks was positively silly to do but it took me 20 minutes, $5 of components and adds a huge layer of nerdiness to my home automation).
You can also look at topics already deep into responses like:
And here I was thinking a picture is worth more than 1,000 words tho…lol
I am thankful for that “what’s your most useful automation” link… I am scrolling thru it as I type this…
I thought to take a different approach and post a couple of snippets to share with the community as well as the brands used, Dashboard layout, and the few automations I have created.
Exactly! My favorite automation is the flavor of the week, my best dashboards are what I’ve done today. It is almost a full time job geeking out HA, it would be another part time job to post all the cool stuff I’ve done here. And I’ve done some seriously cool stuff (yesterday) and have some really cool stuff happening (tomorrow onward).
I am working on a notebook for my wife should I die before her. She will need something to give to an electrician to restore the house to dumb status. (Few buyers care for “smart homes”).
I did that already, it’s basically how to return the house to “press this switch to turn on this light”, we both agree that it’s far too nerdy for her to use without me. I even have a failsafe command on my Siri that basically puts HA in a mode where it does the bare minimum in case I’m traveling or if I were to dust off this mortal coil. You and I think alike, haha.
My dashboard is essentially a slightly modified version of the old auto-generated style. I don’t care about the dashboard, and don’t put work in it. Everything should work without needing a dashboard.
