FINALLY installed home assistant last night.

Get ready for endless configuration

If you have some smart lighting, start with automating those. My exterior floods and led strips turn on at sunset and off at sunrise, that's just a basic time and energy saver. If you have any rgb lights, you can use them as indicators for certain events. Maybe you want them to turn red when your cameras detect a person outside when everyone is home and your smart locks are locked. I'm going to put some led strips in the bathroom soon and make them light dimly on motion at night so we don't have to blind ourselves. I'm also going to put some under shelves in the pantry because lighting in there sucks, and I'll make them turn off on a timer because children.

If you haven't heard of ESPHome, check it out because it's awesome. I have it on a nodemcu with a temp probe monitoring my chest freezer. My last one went out and I didn't know for probably at least a day or two and I lost some food. Now I get a notification via the HA mobile app if the temp stays above 5 degrees for more than 10 minutes. The same nodemcu w/esphome also monitors that freezer's real time power consumption, at least until I put in a whole-home energy meter with per-circuit monitoring.

HA is pulling data from my ecobee thermostats. I don't have any automations with them, but I do check the charts from time to time and it helped me notice that one of my units had been running longer than it should. Had a leaky evaporator and I was able to get it addressed before we were sweating our asses off.

At christmas time I use HA to control the tree lights. Timers are fine, but our tree isn't in a window, it's just for us, so it turns on and off at certain times depending on whether someone's home.



There's a lot more that I will do eventually, mostly dealing with lighting because apparently I'm the only sob in this house who knows that lights turn off. At some point we will never have to use a light switch again nor have to tell alexa to do it, because they will all turn on and off appropriately on presence/motion/time/whatever. I've been working a lot with arduinos for various sensors to help with all this. The pro minis are pretty small (and there are even smaller versions), cheap, and can run on batteries so you can put them just about anywhere.

I don't have a wall-mounted kiosk for HA yet, but I will soon. I'm going to put a chore checklist on it for the kids so the wifi won't work on their tablets/playstation/etc until their chores are done.


We can talk about this stuff forever if you want.

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Get ready for endless configuration

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HA has really focused on simplifying the setup for “regular” users over the last year to make configuration MUCH easier. The yaml configuration is pretty much gone other than for very specific instances. Most everything is done in the GUI and it prompts through everything. The addition of blueprints makes adding automations a breeze as well. I use Node Red for my automations and I haven’t touched any configuration in about 6 months. It’s been rock solid and I haven’t even needed to reboot the machine other than for regular updates.

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I can’t seem to make myself buy a device when I can make it for 1/3 the cost and write the code for free.

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Yeah, even if the extra time it takes makes it not worth the savings, you've still learned something plus you have a device that works like you want. Sometimes nobody makes what you need.

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But I know everyone can’t do that.

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The hardest part is knowing what's possible and what to search for. If you can follow directions you can build these things.

I've been working on a plan for a makerspace somewhere in the (BR, maybe west side) area, so if anyone is interested let me know. I'd have a few 3d printers, maybe a laser cutter, a few workbenches and a wide assortment of misc electronic components, soldering stations, protoboards, wire, meters, microcontrollers/leds/etc. Whatever you'd need to build or repair stuff.

Anyone interested?

When I need to control something I just use the dashboard on my phone. But pretty much everything is automated so I don't touch a thing most days.

- all smart switches are wifi flashed with tasmota
- front door is a zwave deadbolt. Can change the user codes from HA and it lets me know which code was used to open the door. Can also lock and unlock from HA
- HA monitors the temp of my fermentation fridge/kegerator. Have a temp probe attached to a D1 mini to send the data. Have another D1 mini with BLE that monitors my Tilt for during fermentation
- old house I had LED strips on top of kitchen cabinets. HA contoured the colors. Had it set up to go from blue to red for 32 to 100 degrees
- connected to home alarm using a envisalink board. Arms and disarms depending if we are home
- ecobee thermostat gets set to home or away based on presence as well

All my automations are done in nodered plug in. I like the visual aspect over HA built in automations

Check out digiblur on YouTube. Pretty sure he has some videos with flashing tasmota on some.