this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io

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Home Assistant things you'd miss now; what is a great little thing HA does for you, I'll start. (feddit.uk)
submitted 4 months ago by Lifebandit666@feddit.uk to c/homeassistant@lemmy.world
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So last week I had a Proxmox fuckup and lost everything. I learnt the hard way what living without backups is like and I don't recommend it.

Silver lining is that I don't have to tidy up all those old automations and entities anymore.

Anyway it made me realise what I'd miss if I didn't have them, because I didn't have them.

I've been really really tired this week. I get up at 5am and start work at 6, and while I don't like it, I usually cope with it better than most and have comments about how "It's too early for you." But not this week.

I've put it down to losing my connection between my alarm clock and HA. I use SleepAsAndroid and have done for a long time. Back when I started it was because it connected to Tasker, but over the years I've moved to HA and still use it.

SleepAsAndroid with Tasker was done with web hooks but I use the MQTT integration with HA. This means it's connected when I'm home but not in network when I'm away, so it can't fire the messages, which is what you want.

Previously I used Node Red to set up this automation but I haven't reinstalled it yet, I'm seeing if I can do it all on HA, then it's one less thing and I can automate in the app.

I spent a while this morning trying to figure out how to reintegrate it with HA and struggled, but eventually I found an integration in HACS which meant I just had to change my device identifier in the alarm app by adding /MyName to the end of the SleepAsAndroid topic so it reads SleepAsAndroid/MyName, add the HACS integration and then add it again in the Integrations pane, with MyName plumbed in.

Then I added a blueprint from the add ons page and left the house to go on a day trip.

In and amongst the day trip I've been making my automation on the HA app via the blueprint, and have come home, loaded a bowl and set my alarm for 1 minute time, then smoke the bowl and wait...

Success!

Hopefully I'll have more energy this week when I wake up to my lights turning on, instead of complete darkness and a strange noise.

Now what would you miss that isn't obvious (like motion activated lights)?

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[–] Lifebandit666@feddit.uk 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

https://github.com/IATkachenko/HA-SleepAsAndroid is the add on if anyone is interested and this is the app https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid.sleep which I paid for premium long ago and have shared that premium with family account to my son's phone too, well worth buying.

When my alarm goes off my hallway light and the lamp on the far side of the room turn on low and the alarm remains silent for a minute, then ramps the volume up.

This means I can get up and not wake Wifey, huge WAF benefits...

I turn the alarm off and HA waits for the motion sensor in the hallway to pick me up, then the far lamp goes off. The next motion sensor on the floor below turns the hallway light off and the front room lights on for me (while the motion sensors do their usual stuff, this is extra).

I also used to use this automation to turn the "I'm sleeping" switch off but I haven't set my sleeping up properly again yet.

If I snooze, the lights go off again and come on when snooze is finished the same as an alarm.

Now to set up my teenage Son's alarm, he was nearly late to school once this week which is unheard of

[–] ErwinLottemann@feddit.de 0 points 4 months ago

fyi if you use the homeassistent app HA knows (if enabled) the time of your next set alarm (it's in the sensor settings for the app)

[–] SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I don't have a lot of HA setup.

But I like to be able to control my living room lights from different places in the room (door and couch) as well as having keyboard shortcuts on my laptop for them

[–] Lifebandit666@feddit.uk 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Keyboard shortcuts sounds interesting, what do you do that with? Also what are the shortcuts you use? I would hate to be button bashing on Helldivers and inadvertently turning my lights on and off

[–] SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I use a combination of Win+L for the main light and Win in combination with some other keys around L, depending on the light.

I use xfce, and in the settings it's possible to define custom shortcuts, where I just use curl to send a request to the HA api.

[–] Schorsch@feddit.de 0 points 4 months ago

I have a very similar setup. I switched to curl+webhook some days ago. Before that I used hass-cli to trigger actions on Home Assistant but I find webhooks to act much faster.

[–] Lifebandit666@feddit.uk 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

My 10 year old son's most missed automation was the house telling him to go to bed. He noticed he was just chilling in bed with YouTube and it was well past his bedtime and asked me to set it up again.

Basically I automated bedtimes years ago so the house tells them to go to bed and an hour later turns their lights off. Didn't think they'd miss that but they did.

[–] SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

next step: an hour later the tranquilizer sentries activate

[–] __init__@programming.dev 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Any recommendations for tranquilizer sentries that work with HA?

[–] paraphrand@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I’m holding out for matter over thread, personally.

[–] bitchkat@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I prefer to give them the Benadryl earlier in the evening.

[–] Lifebandit666@feddit.uk 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

My son walked in to us talking about "Head Count" (number of people you fucked) the other day and we all convinced him we were talking about how old we were when we tried alcohol.

"But Mum said 1, that's like really young"

"Ah but back in our day we had Rum put on our dummies to help teething"

Also chloroform on their pillow-cases gets to sleep in minutes.

[–] bitchkat@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

It was whiskey they used according to my Mum.