Idea Thread - What are your newest, coolest, or most innovative automation implementations?
Posted May 4, 2019, 6:47 PM UTC
1614
I'm working on an automation system for my home heating/cooling... I've got an old two story house, pier and beam (which means I've got a crawlspace), and an attic. Upstairs and downstairs have their own heat/cooling systems. Downstairs uses a much less expensive gas heater, upstairs uses electric; both have electric cooling. I started with setting home/away/sleep temperatures, min and max for upstairs and downstairs, for a total of 12 different settings. I use the thermostat temperatures (up and down), plus temperature sensors outside, in the attic, and in the crawl space. Using a lot of temperature comparing, the system will:
- Heat the downstairs a degree hotter to also heat the upstairs, rather than use the upstairs electric heat, unless it starts getting too cold upstairs, in which case it will drop the downstairs temperature back down and turn on the upstairs heat
- Turn on the upstairs fan instead of heater if it's too cold but the attic is warm
- Turn on the downstairs fan instead of AC when it's too hot but the crawlspace is cool
- Turn off the heating and AC for upstairs and downstairs if a door is left open too long
- Turn off the fans and set the house to "away" if there is no one home
- Use the current indoor and outdoor temperatures to determine if the house should be set to heating or cooling
- If anyone touches the thermostat, my Google Home yells at them in my best dad voice
I intend, but have yet to implement:
- Set the house to "sleeping" early if all the lights are off and the doors are locked
- Turn on the (currently broken) attic fans when the difference between attic temperature and outside temperature gets to be too much
- Turn on an inside/outside circulation fan if the temperature outside is in the Goldilocks zone (not too hot, not too cold)
- Implement a draconian energy-saving policy when the AC/heater runs for more than a set amount of time in a day, by raising the max temperature and lowering the minimum temperature
- Add some random phrases to the Google Home trigger, so it'll say things like "I'm not made of money!" or "Heat doesn't grow on trees!" or "What is this, Siberia?" when people mess with the temperature
8
I have an automation for when I play a movie on my server. It sends an actionable notification to my apple watch prompting me for my movie watching mode - the options include theater and chill. Theater mode turns off all the lamps and overhead lights, turns on a light strip behind the media center at a dim setting, and turns off the heating/air conditioning so the fan noise doesn't interfere with the movie. Chill mode is similar except the lamps and overhead lights just dim to a comfortable setting and the heating/air conditioning remains on.
Now when I pause the movie, I get another notification on my watch with the options movie finished and movie paused. If the movie finished option is selected, all the lights come back on as they were before starting the movie, the light strip turns off, and the heating/ac turns back on. If movie paused is selected, the lights turn on to a dim setting, a light strip in the kitchen turns on, and the bathroom light turns on. It returns to the theater mode settings when I select play again.
3
Now when I pause the movie, I get another notification on my watch with the options movie finished and movie paused.
If you're using Kodi and HomeAssistant for example, you can probably do away with that one and just make it a bit smarter. For example, with mine, if I pause something (it's easy to tell as the Kodi status reports as paused in HA) then bring the lights up to a dim setting. If I stop something (again HA knows the difference) then do something else (you could even get really funky if you really wanted to and check the amount of time remaining for the media and make an assumption based on that if the movie is finished or not, but I find hitting stop enough).
You might like it the way you have it, that's fine, but you do have options if you'd rather automate your automation a bit more :D
1
Telling google home to turn on my computer. It will reply 'activating now', sends a command to Smartthings webcore, which executes a wake on lan command to my PC. Telling it to hibernate or restart acts accordingly also with a lightweight add on software on the PC.
Telling google home 'It's go time' will turn off the battery tender plugged into my car, open my garage, activate appropriate lights, so I can just hop in and drive off. Garage closes afterwards via phone presence sensor status change.
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How'd you get your PC activation setup?
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Enable wake on lan on your PC. Then have the Google home command sent to IFTTT, which triggers a webhook url, which is sent to Webcore in Smartthings. Webcore listens for that command, and fires a wake command to your PC IP address. It all happens in half a second or so. You would set it up in the backwards order, first setup webcore to send the wake command, then it will provide you a url to feed into IFTTT, which you then connect to Google.
For hibernate/sleep/restart/shutdown, install Airytec Switch Off on your PC, enable the remote command feature (it's within the local network only so it's safe). It will provide you with urls for each command (ie hibernate would be http://[PC IP address]:8000/?action=System.Hibernate). You would then repeat the same setup as above, except webcore executes these URL's instead of a wake command.
I hope it was clear enough, any clarifications required, let me know
2
Thank you for the write-up!!
1
I have a Litter Robot for the cats' business and when it needs to be emptied an LED on Homeseer HS-WD200 outside the room with the Litter Robot blinks red. The LED is green when it reports fine and yellow blinking when cycling.
2
Amazing. I need to know more. Our litter robot is in the basement and I’d kill to have an indicator on the main floor.
1
Recently found out that Smartthings buttons also very accurately report temperature. I had a spare one, so I put it inside my entertainment center and use it to trigger a set of cooling fans that are plugged into a smart plug.
That'll qualify under the coolest category....
Amazon shiped my order twice and I have extra buttons. Now I found a use for them.
Does it happen to do anything else like humidity/pressure or just temperature? How do you get the data, on press or can you query it? or does it report at a set interval? (go easy on me I'm completely new to ST and trying to learn a bit more)
Don't mind the questions at all! I learned by asking the same stuff!
The button only reports temperature. It reports every time the temperature changes, even if it's only by a degree. Sometimes it will not report for hours because the temp doesn't change and other times it reports very frequently. It's incredibly accurate which was a very nice surprise.