I love playing with my HA and associated devices. I suspect that most of you reading this get a bit of a jolt every time you add and incorporate a new sensor, camera, integration and get to play with it.
I have all the door/window sensors and locks/covers, every angle of my exterior covered with cameras, alarm, network devices, appliances, sprinklers, household devices covered.
Any ideas for a new thing I can play with?
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Can I recommend taking a look at espHome? Getting started might be a little expensive depending on what you’ve got, but you can build pretty much anything for pretty cheap.
As I replied to another who suggested ESPHome - I don’t want a bunch boards and wires stuck everywhere and unless I am misunderstanding it I’ll need to get into 3d printing to make enclosures for stuff. I can see going there some day but no room for a makerspace in this house until the boy moves out.
There are some specialised esp32 devices sold with cases (sometimes optional), but 3d printing is another fun thing to get into since you seem bored;)
If the boy has a gaming rig, then he also has a CAD workstation.
I managed to get a dodgy copy of AutoCAD 2 running on my 80286 with an 80287 maths co pro that I persuaded my parents to buy me for Chrimbo. Sadly, it was a bit shite. The next version of AutoCAD needed a 32 bit machine with 32 MB (yes MB) of RAM. That was way out of my league.
Depending on the age of the boy and given how long the little darlings are tending to hang around these days, a constructive bribery system in lieu of rent or pocket money enhancement might be in order 8)
I’ve been an electronics hobbyist for years, and I still don’t own a 3D printer. You can buy premade enclosures in almost every size you can imagine. Then just drill holes to mount IO ports.
I do want to get a 3D printer exactly for this reason, but I’ve just never gotten around to buying one. They are certainly not a necessity if you want to build your own stuff.
NFC tags are cheap and fun
Actually NFC tags were one of my first things back when I was using HomeKit. They are much better in HA because you can fire an event without any interaction with the device that scans it and that is pretty cool.
Thanks, I have a 10-pack of tags that I could deploy to do random stuff for my own enjoyment. I appreciate the reminder!
The only downside is that the smartphone needs to be unlocked 🙁
Not if you build an NFC tag reader! Then anyone can scan tags! Great for music jukeboxes!
Do you mean that smartphones can act as a NFC tag? Even when they’re locked?
Oh sorry, I meant that with an nfc tag reader you don’t need the smart phone. Apologies that I wasn’t clear.
Oh, nooouuuu! I was so happy when I read your post! 😆 Thanks for clarifying.
You don’t need to unlock your phone to fire an event in HomeAssistant. My iPhone needs to be awake but will still scan and run shortcut while locked.
In Android NFC doesn’t work when the device is locked 🙁 That’s strange that it does on iPhones, usually is the other way around! 😄
Ooh, Ive heard of these. Can you name some of the ways you use them? Do these effectively work as a cheap alternative to a physical switch or can they be used more creatively?
Yeah it’s essentially a trigger. I have a few purposes. One is for my dumb washing machine plugged into an energy monitoring smart plug. After it registers the washing is done, I’ll get alerts through the house in intervals until I get up and scan the NFC tag on the washing machine (I forget to hang out washing.
As I’m in a rental and I can’t have smart switches so I have smart globes and put tags on the switches to toggle the lights.
One by my bedside table to turn off all the lights and smart plugs.
One on my front door to set my away from home scene.
I also have a signed band poster hung on the wall with one, which opens the album in Spotify.
Good fun.
Thanks for sharing! The band poster is particularly very cool :)
I wonder if someone would go so far as to put tags on each of their record albums to do the same thing (kind of odd not actually playing the vinyl, but it’d be easier to play an album!)
I use mine for a jukebox with various playlists. Allows anyone in the house to scan a tag. You can also have them do anything a button can do (run a script, turn on/off devices, etc.
ESP-32 based voice controller, with LLM support: https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/s3_box_voice_assistant/
Do you use Plex at all? One fun integration is to turn the lights off automatically when something starts to play, then turn them back on when paused/stopped. It’s fun to see the lights auto-dim as media starts to play.
I do but Mrs has clearly stated that she dislikes light level automations - I have a couple FP2 presence sensors and I set up various zones so the light would follow you around and dim asa you left. I wigged her out.
Have you got any air quality sensors? Particulates, CO2, VOCs, CO, Radon, there’s a while bunch of sensors, and a variety of DIY projects to put them together.
It also has the practical benefit of maybe improving your health.
My CO2 sensor has dramatically changed my routines. My space isn’t small - maybe 1200 square feet/100 sq m - but it must be pretty well sealed, because I can easily see my own breathing add to CO2. Nevermind cooking on the gas stove. Treadmill time adds 500+ ppm.
Now, I open windows every chance I get (which isn’t super often, because the dewpoint is 70 oF/20 oC in Atlanta), and I’ve shifted a lot of my cooking to an electric tea kettle, hot plate, and toaster oven.
Do you have a suggestion for a good air quality sensor (especially for CO2 and VOCs) that outputs reliable results, works over ZigBee and is preferably battery powered? I had a CO2 sensor once but that needed to be calibrated outside really frequently so I stopped using it.
If you want a whole kit then the AirGradient ones look pretty nice
Thanks for the recommendation. That is pretty pricey but if it works, that’s fine. Though probably not feasible to have in every room then :D
But I assume it also needs periodic recalibration for the CO2 sensor, right?
The CO2 sensor calibration thing is inherent in the technology. They drift, a lot, and without occasional reference to a known standard, there’s no way to know whether “1000” is really 1000, or 500, or 2000, but exactly how that gets implemented seems to vary a lot. I have an SCD30 board from Adafruit, which internally records CO2 minima and, over the course of week or so, adjusts its calibration so that minimum is 420. That means no special calibration procedure, but it does have to be somewhere that it gets periodic fresh air exposure.
There’s a newer, photoacoustic sensor technology that doesn’t seem to require continuous recalibration, but (at least this one: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/22956 ) require an extensive initial calibration.
Sorry for the late reply. That photacoustic one looks interesting. I have no issue with an extensive initial calibration when it then just works without me needing to take care of it regularly. Thank you :)
One of my favorite automations is my “temperature lamp.” HA takes an average temperature, humidity, and illuminance from various outdoor sensors around my property. I have a template sensor that uses these values, then gives me a “feels-like” outdoor temperature. Another template sensor takes this “feels-like” temperature and converts it to a percentage between 0 (freezing) an 100 (> 120 degrees F). It uses this percentage to calculate a value between blue and red on a perceptually-uniform colorspace (CIELAB) and spits out an RGB value. An automation watches this RGB value and applies it to a RGB light bulb in my living room.
The result is that I have a light that displays what the temperature “feels like” and changes color in a way that people perceive as matching the temperature. So if the lamp looks “kind of blue” it’s going to feel “kind of cold” outside. If the bulb looks “kind of red,” it’s going to feel “kind of warm.”
I set this up for fun, but it’s actually ended up being really useful. Before we leave the house, we can just glance over at the lamp and know if we need to put on a sweatshirt or a coat, or maybe leave the outerwear at home.
lol - that won’t work for me, I live in Texas and that means my light would always be deep, dark red. Cool concept though.
Hook up your bathroom fan to a humidity sensor
Automate any window blinds
Christmas leds on exterior. Dig-quad with WLED software.
Bathroom fan connected to a humidity sensor is my (and my family’s )absolute favorite automation. I spent so much time on my system setting up sensors, configuring things, etc, but nothing gives me more delight than when I’m taking a shower, the fan kicks on automatically and then shuts off automatically.
I haven’t had to deal with foggy mirrors in years!
What does your logic look like for the humidity uptick? I tried the trending integration (or something like that), but couldn’t get it to work properly. Does the fan trigger on a sudden spike in humidity? Do you compare “ baseline” values with another sensor in another room?
I originally completely over engineered it by tracking the YTD humidity and adjusting for the difference between the current average and last year’s and then someone mentioned just putting a second humidity sensor outside the bathroom. So I just do that. If the bathroom humidity spikes about 10% over the humidity outside the bathroom, it turns on and then it turns off at a static number.
It sounds wasteful, but I already had a sensor in my primary bedroom, and the thermostat is right outside the kids bathroom so I didn’t have to install anything new.
I then added a cooldown to make sure it doesn’t end up in a loop where it keeps turning on and off (that’s never actually happened but it seemed like a good idea).
I also use it as a way to control the lights. I use motion detection to turn on the lights, but they used to turn off while someone was in the shower. Now it checks to see if the fan is on and if it is, resets the motion detection timer.
Done all that except the Xmas stuff - my neighbor across the street puts up incredible holiday lighting all year long…literally tens of thousands of dollars worth of gear in play. I can’t afford to even make a showing next to that.
Maybe something from My config will inspire you.
Power monitoring and temperature
I have a athom smart switch plugged between the wall and the washing machine just for power monitoring. When the power is above a certain level for thirty sec, then drops below a certain level for thirty sec. It announces over the Google home that the washing is done.
I started to play around with WLED and integrated a whole mess of LED lights to HA. I’d also recommend ESPHome so you can build your own devices. Voice control, water flow rate sensors, etc.
Yes, LEDs and water flow and voice control among other goodies.
I keep hearing ESPHome but it seems so bare metal - how do you make the little boards look like they belong? I really don’t want to have to start 3d printing stuff to make enclosures.
3D printing is half the fun! Although I have no skills in design so I usually look for STLs that other have created. The NFC tag reader was such a fun project because I got to: 3D print the enclosure, solder the wiring for the ESP and NFC hardware, write the login within Node Red to work as a juke box, and then I wrote an excel file that I use to track my playlists (allows me to copy/paste the Spotify share link and have it translate it into an NFC tag payload).
Do you like birds? BirdNet-Pi might be interesting. https://github.com/alexbelgium/hassio-addons/blob/master/birdnet-pi/README.md
Not an answer: whats your setup for your cameras/security?
I don’t do NVR - my servers are all low power except my PleX and I have so much storage dedicated to that I just can’t see adding more. All cameras have SD storage and I have key events backing up to cloud.
Just discovering this after two months. This thread has given me some great ideas and is sure to keep me busy with my HA setup for a while. Thank you everyone 🙂
