Smart to do list

Hey!

So I started living on myself and now I have one thing that I would really like.

This thing would solve 2 problems:

  1. When having a (partial) smart home, you still have to do manual chores to keep it up and running. For example, emptying your robot vacuum, replacing batteries for sensors or watering the plants. Currently we can probably automate this with a push Notification to your phone or link HA to a to-do list. But when you did the chore, you have to manually remove it.

  2. The smart home at this stage is mostly a fun project for 1 person in the family and the rest doesn’t really care, as long as it works. But what if that person passes away or is away for a longer time (business trip or getting milk). The functionality of the smart home would maybe slowly decay (new APIs, breaking changes). But also batteries decharge, “why don’t my curtains open automatically anymore?”.

The idea I want to propose is a smart to do list. An easy and smart way to manage the manual chores that need to be done within a home. But since we can also see the data after the chore, we could automatically dismiss it. For example, there’s a to-do list for a full Roomba, the state is full. You empty it and place it back, HA now reports it as empty. It could automatically be removed from the list to keep the list as relevant as possible.

This way you as the smart home enthousiast could document the steps needed to do certain things. For example if some unstable integration (maybe a self made one) needs a device to be restarted to be recognized again. The Todo list would have the summary of the actions needed to be done to work again.

I think this is an awesome feature what would be very beneficial for example for smart home enthousiast who want to make their home a bit more future proof and usable by their other people. And this would also benefit people with a really big smart home, or people who just want to see a direct list of things to do.

What I personally want to do with it is just put every manual chore in, “hey you haven’t decided yet what you want to eat next week.”, “Don’t forget to water the plants”.

I am also very eager to implement this myself, but I would like some more guidance during the implementation and discussion before I start, since I don’t want to start a whole project to only hear that it’s not good enough, or not going to get added.

Joost

There are a couple options covered in the following threads, but none of them is a task/chore specific integration.

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Right, signed up to make this post to forget to search. As I never been in the forums before, what’s the best way to help these topics?

You might have a look at the Grocy add-on, which has a “chores” section. Not as smart as you want, but it’s a start.

Hi Guys,
Ive got ToDoist running with Shopping list and To-Do_list also running now,
I have had a push notification to users phones when a new item is added to the shopping list, so I thought I would add the same automation for the to do list.

I duplicated the shopping list automation and changed the trigger to the To do list, but I have had issues with HA sending out the push notification.
If I run the test, it triggers, but If I update the list, it fails to trigger,

alias: To Do List (TESTING)
description: “”
trigger:

  • platform: event
    event_type: Local_To-do_updated
    event_data:
    action: add
    condition: []
    action:
  • service: notify.mobile_app_iphone_210
    data:
    data:
    ClickAction: /Local_To-do
    url: /shopping-list
    title: Shopping List
    message: "To do Added to list "
    enabled: false
  • service: notify.mobile_app_s22
    data:
    message: "To do Added to list "
    title: TO DO LIST
    mode: single

Playing around with the same idea too, I’ve got notifications working when an item is added to a Todoist list using the new To-Do Ui in Home Assistant, but not when an item is added to a list either via Alexa (using the linked skill) or via the Todoist app. In both instances I can see the item being added to Home Assistant and syncing correctly, but it looks like the Todoist integration doesn’t follow the HA To Do integration standards and raise the correct todo.add_item event when it synchronises.
This screenshot shows the difference:

Screenshot 2023-11-03 at 11.32.38

The state was changed to 18 by me adding an item in Home Assistant, the change to 19 was when I added an item via Alexa.

FWIW this is the YAML to trigger from adding an item locally:

platform: event
event_type: call_service
event_data:
  domain: todo
  service: add_item
  service_data:
    entity_id:
      - todo.alexa_shopping_list

I’ll keep digging to see how to trigger from an item created outside Home Assistant, unless anyone has any ideas? My current thinking is to just trigger on a state change of the todo item e.g.:
{{trigger.to_state | int > trigger.from_state | int }}

1 Like

Hi, I am creating an integration extension that would meet your problem: Automation of house chores (smart task list management)

I will be very grateful for any ideas that could improve the resulting extension.