Idea Thread - What are your newest, coolest, or most innovative automation implementations?
Posted Feb 16, 2019, 12:08 AM UTC
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I installed a sonoff wifi switch on the mighty mule gate at the entrance to our driveway then created an applet with IFTTT to automatically open the gate when I turn down my street so that I can pull straight into my driveway without having to stop every time and wait for the gate to open.
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I've got a Xiaomi motion sensor setup that awards my son with ten points if it's triggered at 6.45am or later (only triggers once per day) and is an award for not getting up too early. We then allow him to accumulate and exchange for v-bucks on fortnite. He loves it. I've set up a skil so he can ask Alexa how many points he has and she will give a live update. Points are stored in a Google firebase realtime database for free.
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On this, I also created a skil that plays a song for him to brush his teeth to. At the end, Alexa asks if he brushed to the end of the song. If yes, two points get added and she congratulates him. If not, no points are added. The points total is all the same as the one above. Great replacement for a star chart.
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These are awesome automations. Would totally set up a similar situation if I had kids.
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Thanks. I think its more for me than for him to be honest, haha. Love tinkering with things like this.
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TL;DR: I created a bedtime alarm/timer/game to make sure my wife and I go to bed at the same time.
My wife and I always try to go to bed at the same time. Every night, she goes to get ready for bed between 10-10:30pm. It takes her 20-30 minutes to get ready, during which time I play video games to relax a bit. When she’s ready, she texts me to let me know and I’m supposed to wrap up and go to bed.
More frequently than I care to admit, I’ve missed her text message or I’ve been too wrapped up in my game and end up playing for another 20-30 min.
Solution
Home automation to the rescue. I got an Echo Button that sits on my wife’s nightstand. When she presses it, the downstairs Echo Dot declares, “Hear ye! Hear ye! The bedtime alarm has been triggered!”, a notification is pushed to my phone, and the living room light flickers on and off thrice, so there are no excuses for me to miss it. Also, behind the scenes, a timer starts, and a widget appears in Home Assistant showing the timer value.
I wrap up my game and get upstairs to press the Echo Button again. It “ends” the alarm, which locks in the timer’s duration and simultaneously pushes it to my phone via notification and logs it to a CSV file on my server. As a bonus, it turns off everything downstairs and makes sure the house is locked up.
If the alarm was ended within 5 min, it’s a success and I get a congratulatory message. If I’m slower than 5 min, it’s a failure and I get a sarcastic, chastising message.
Since it’s logged to a CSV, I report on it as well so my wife and I can see how long it usually takes me to come upstairs and check how frequently I make it. It’s become a game of its own, in a way.
EDIT: Fixed the markdown
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I have also installed a real time temperature and humidity sensor in my garage using a Nodemcu board with a DHT11 sensor then. The board pushes that data string every 30 seconds to the MQTT dashboard app on my phone so that I can always have trusted RT weather conditions at my house even when I'm out of town. I am hoping to integrate so much more using that same platform and eventually run Home Assistant from a raspberry pi but I am still a pretty fresh noob and these two were my first real projects other than tinkering and screwing stuff up :)
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That sounds really cool! Much more techie than just using Acurite sensors or something else. Definitely a good platform to expand on.
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I just got into the Nodemcu/8266 universe. Those boards are amazing, and at about $8 per sensor I can put one in every single room of the house capable of monitoring temperature and humidity.
The sensors are connected via Homebridge running on a Raspberry Pi Zero to Apple HomeKit and Alexa.
I've had chronic furnace issues my entire adult life between the two homes we've owned so I'm always mindful of how much it runs and our recent super cold snap has given me a lot of data about my home. I've determined that the insulation on the second floor is much better than the first floor (where the thermostat is located). You can actually see it on a graph.
I'm considering adding a node inside the furnace to monitor the diagnostic LED so I don't ever have to check if it is in an error status again. I could also probably just wire it directly to the furnace board, but I'm certain my wife wouldn't appreciate me destroying a $300 part that controls the heat if it went wrong.
My next sensor node has a motion detector added on because there's several more pins that can be added and monitored on and I already found good code for it . it can work on occupancy data alongside temperature and humidity for even deeper stats.
And once I've determined the effective distance for the motion sensor, a driveway sensor is slated to go in this spring that I'm hoping to integrate into the lights alongside the driveway.
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Water solenoid on sprinkler that shoots my car windshield with water in winter to remove the frost.
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ROFL you must live down south....
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Yeah all the way down south in Australia :)
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I'm sure others have done this but I use a combination of my Vera Lite and Tasker on my Android phone.
At 12:01AM I have a task that runs on my Android phone to determine sunrise/sunset. Once it determines sunset, it sets this as execution time of a task to turn my front porch light on (controlled with a GE Z-wave paddle). Tasker sends this to my VeraLite using AutoVera. At 11:00 every evening, AutoVera sends a command to turn the porch light off.
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Am I missing something? This is a pretty simple automation that a hub like wink can do.
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Maybe you are missing something? I did mention that I have a Vera and not a Wink.
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And it doesn’t have a feature of triggering things at specific times?
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Until just now I had not realized that I could set a scene that would run on the moving target that is sunrise or sunset. My point, which seems to have been lost here, is that I was handling this with a combo of my phone and my home controller.
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And also, my apologies if I misinterpreted your tone as snarky. If that was not the intent then I did not mean to be snarky back.
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I have a colored bulbs in three lamps around the house as well as an Echo device in every room. I put an echo button at the front door and when pressed, the lamp bulbs turn blue and the echo in every room announces that the dog needs to go out (looking to change this to every room WHERE motion has been detected in the last x minutes). When we open the door to let the dog out it resets the lamps to their previous state.
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What are you using for the Echo announcements?
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Echo has a multiroom announce function.
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You can set a routine in the Alexa app that makes a whole house announcement.
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echo button
I've been using MightyPaw https://amzn.to/2BYaHNB but I like your idea too cause then we can track how many times the dog has gone out and send a reminder to ourselves if the dog hasn't been let out in X time on the rare occurrences she hasn't pressed the button.
I just wish I could hack the MightyPaw to also send button presses to Home Assistant since using an Echo button means I'll have to rely on a speaker for dog announcements whereas the MightyPaw comes with a receiver that emits a door bell sound.
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So I don't know how innovative this is, but I like it. I have an event that is triggered when our security system is set to armed, we are not within the home geofence, and there is motion detected on our front porch for greater than 3 seconds. It then sends an audio recording of a large dog barking to the tablet we have mounted near the front door, and then after a short delay turns a lamp inside on if it is dark (registered by exterior lux) or raining. Scene shuts off after no motion is detected for 15 seconds.
The greater than 3 seconds tends to weed out deliveries, as to not scare everyone off.
This supplements the video trigger/push notifications we get when this runs.
This is pretty cool. What all are you using to accomplish this?
I run Homeseer as a controller.
Homeseer is integrated with our security system to see the status
I have phones set to a static IP on the network, and use the UltraMon plugin to see if they are active or not, thus setting a presence switch for each member of the family with a phone.
There is a motion sensor on the front porch
Imperihome runs on the tablet, which is triggered by the event to play the sound of the barking dog.