I think most of us did start from lights automation. So am I. For me it was just joy discovering new possibilities. But my gf quickly stepped into with functional demands. Not many thing but I started in January.
first thing was to enable more lights automatically when returning home after work. The point was to enable light in house antechamber, corridor dinning room and kitchen all together as it was our main route almost every day. For this job I utilise geo fencing, dumb motion sensitive lamp over main door powered by Shelly with power metering and the Sun phases.
second major demand was sending notification to mobiles when washing machine finishes. For this job I use Shelly Socket S
following notification route, I added one for case everyone left home leaving some lights turned on. tbh we getting notifications from time to time this time allowing us to turn light off remotely
to help with turning lights off I automated switch in antechamber to turn all lights in the house off on longpress. the same I did for switch next to bedroom.
there is also automation informing us about incoming waste collection (mixed, bio, high volume)
Next big thing on roadmap is smart heating. I have a few months yet.
Automated the heat in my conservatory. Got a 3KW heater in there, used a motion sensor, temp sensor and smart plug. Used the virtual thermostat device, can set a temp via automation or via my google home. If there is no motion detected in the conservatory for 10 mins or more the thermostat is shut off… comes back on next time motion is detected.
Usual lights automation, certain lights come on 30 mins before sunset. If noone is home then they will shut off at a random time between 10pm and midnight. Porch light comes on if I arrive home after sunset…
used the virtual alarm system and wireless pir sensors, have it arm itself when everyone leaves the house and disarm when someone comes home. When triggered it currently flashes every light in the house, intend to get a siren for it.
I have zoneminder setup with object detection… got it so when zoneminder detects a “person” round the back of the house it triggers a virtual pir sensor in HA… which of course it wired into the alarm system.
Got a zoneminder camera pointed at the cat flap and a virtual pir sensor setup that is triggered when zoneminder recognises a “cat”.
I’ve got much more setup but other peeps have covered it above.
tapped the door bell, it works and looks like a traditional door bell, but now I get a notification on both my girlfriend’s phone and mine. (Wemos D1 Mini as the brain, made my own board)
when alarm is triggered by a open door during the day when we are away (and the alarm is armed) ha sends notifications to our phones with a photo snapshot to our phones and Google TTS pronounces that. Google TTS also does this for pending, disarmed and armed notifications included.
my girlfriend, myself and our cleaning lady has a RF remote that enables and disables the alarm.
when alarm is triggered during night by open door all lights in living room light up full brightness and lights in our bedroom turn on. (Critical iOS notifications)
garbage Google TTS notification and to mobile phones when next day garbage pickup
When alarm disarmed lights turns on or off depending on sun state, including Sonos speakers plays a specific radio station on a specific volume.
for alarm we have two armed states. One when we are away an one when we are going to bed. When alarm is armed_home all lights will turn on with the lowest brightness as possible.
Markdown card on our mobile phones with all the things that are happening in our home:
doors open, windows open (per room), lights on (per room) media players playing (per room), motion sensor movement (per room) HACS updates available, Core updates available etc.
fully automated garden irrigation with a water tank, a aquarium pump and a nodemcu that has a temp/humid sensor and rain sensor. When there is no rain for the last 5 hours, the pump has not been triggered for the last 5 hours (manually) and the sun is set the irrigation runs for 5 minutes.
both in bedroom and living room we use Google Nest Hub’s with CATT to cast the complete Lovelace interface. It turns off the cast when the alarm is turned on and starts the cast again when someone turns the alarm off.
two camera’s: one to snapshot the back door when someone opens it when alarm is armed, other one to check on my bunny’s when we are at work
All my lights are smart either by a smart bulb or a custom built system that lives inside my wall socket. With blind plates and touch sensors we can turn on or off the light.
Hallway, upstairs hallway, toilet, bathroom, walk in closet, attic hallway all have motion sensors.
when there is rain detected and a window is open, Google pronounces a TTS message and a notification is sent to our mobile phones.
when we leave the house, enabling the alarm and there is a window open, ha sends notification to our phones which one are open.
Built three Lovelace views. One mobile phone friendly, one desktop friendly and one tablet view friendly.
Think there is more, but not on the top of my mind right now
@Troon Hm… good point, I was mainly thinking about overcharging. What would you suggest as a solution then? Turn everything off by hand when you go to sleep?
And where do you draw the line? I saw you have a Banana Pi, why do you trust it in the first place?
The Pi draws many many times fewer current than a phone that is charging. As long as the pi has a (real, not Chinese fake) CE logo and perhaps is UL certified, you can be sure it’s not spontaneously going to catch fire anytime soon.
Rule number one should be never ever get a cheap charger from China, they usually do not have internal protection circuits when they overheat or draw too much current.
Rule 2 is never leave your phone next to your bed in the charger, if it starts to catch fire, the smoke alone can incapacitate you before you even are waking up because of it.
What you COULD do I guess is use an adapter that has a very low current rating (<1 amps), that way the adapter and your phone will become less hot (less current flowing through).
The best idea: Get a smoke detector in the room where you charge your phones (or any mobile devices with big batteries).
I charge phones overnight, too, and “trust” the phone charger / USB power supply (same thing, really) that is running my Pi. There is plenty of electronics that runs 24/7 even excluding any “smart” stuff (fridge, freezer, cooker clock, PVR, heating controller, burglar alarm, router, switches and access points). Most people on here will be adding numerous permanently-on cheap Chinese power supplies into the mix with smart lightbulbs etc.
My point was that using a smart plug to control a phone charger for safety reasons is like taking a taxi rather than driving yourself because the roads are unsafe.
I hadn’t considered overcharging: I trust my phones’ circuitry to keep that all under control, and we have good smoke alarms in case something does go wrong, and we charge our phones in fairly non-flammable places relative to the amount of energy in a phone battery (substantial solid wood surface on a tile floor).
Say what???
Do you even know what the CE marking means?
It’s worth nothing more than my used toilet paper.
Yes really.
Remember a few years back when Samsung phones cought fire.
You’re saying they did not have the CE marking then?
What about all the Segway wannabes a few years ago? There was literally one exploding every day just in our country.
They had the marking so what could possibly be wrong?
For your own sake, read what the CE marking actually is and what is needed to put one on a product. I think you will be surprised…
You are 100% right about CE. That’s why I also noted the UL (at least for the USA).
Let’s take this into another thread if people want to discuss this further, so we don’t go off topic on this one
What really made life easier was a letterbox/mailbox notification i set up few month ago.
We always struggled to find the right key in heavy rain only to find out there is nothing in.
I was also able to create some card to show how often mail was thrown in.
@florian.ec Curious to know what sensor you are using. Was thinking of using a Xiaomi vibration sensor for it but might give a lot of false positives depending on the heavy trucks passing by.
I happen to have a camera with motion detect near my mailbox, but I have helped others with a few different methods. A big caveat with wireless is most mailboxes are metal, so getting a signal out of one can be challenging. Usually magnet/reeds work best. You can use esphome if power is nearby. For batteries there are some cool tricks you can do with bare esp8266 boards where a battery can last over a year on a charge. If you are good at soldering and interested in that let me know so I can post links to my code/photos/schematics. If not, one of my favorites is the ecolink door sensors. Those have a very strong signal, are zwave, batteries last long, and have screw terminals where you can add an external reed switch if needed. The external reed opens up lots of options for hiding things and getting antennae located properly.
first i thought of using door or window sensor (magnet based). But my Mailbox is all metal, what interrupt the sensor and i also could not place it the way i want.
I am using a Fibaro Motion Sensor(Z-Wave). It’s placed on the side near the opening and the sensor is pointed to the back (So when you open the Mailbox, it’s not triggered. Only when something is thrown in or taken out.
This is working very well for weeks. No false alarms until now.
I experienced this too, had to place a Aeotec Range Extender (Z-Wave) half way between the Controller and the Sensor.
I had a similar challenge when adding a reed/magnet to my metal breaker panel door. I was able to find a suitable location, but it was challenging since the metal box interferes with the magnetic fields required to trigger the reed. I will put it this way… there was a lot of dancing around rotating and translating the magnet and reed with masking tape before I found the magic spot. Since I used an ecolink door sensor, I was able to place the radio on a wall inside the garage behind where the panel is mounted. It was extremely easy to fish a 2foot long wire from the reed sensor, through the panel and wall, and to the screw terminals.
FWIW I bought some cheap reeds from amazon, and used some medium size neodymium magnets (10mm diameter x 10mm thick) I already had on hand. Any nearby ferrous metal affects the magnet a lot… warps the field to where it effectively weakens it when it is stuck to a large metal sheet. So you have to be a lot closer than normal. That magnet/reed I have works at over 1" without metal… just under 1/4" with metal involved.
