Not the things that you depend on, but automations that are just for fun
On Christmas morning, when the motion sensor in the hallway next to the living room is triggered, it slowly turns on the Christmas tree, turns on the stereo, sets the stereo volume to 0, starts a Christmas music playlist, then slowly turns up the volume.
Sounds magical! Nabu, play Imagine Dragons.
Nabu announces, “The great fire orb has retreated” every evening at sunset.
This is fucking glorious! Hahaha
When my girlfriend is over and the freezer door is open, I play ice ice baby. It never fails to cause some eye rolls
When I plug my phone in to charge, it says “Oh yeah, stick it in me, baby”.
Yes, I am a fully grown adult.
And I can do what the fuck I want (regardless how much my partner requests I do not do what the fuck I want).
Wait how does one set up that sort of thing with your phone?
In alarm away mode, if motion sensor in the middle of the house is triggered without having set off the motion sensors elsewhere, disable that sensor until alarm disabled.
Friggin’ hyperactive cat, doing leaping zoomies.
Giant halloween window eyes that randomly wink every few mins.
My Chromecast slowly stopped turning on the sound system and TV via CEC so instead of buying a new one, my family knows there’s a red button in the theater room. It cuts the power to the Chromecast via a smart switch and then power cycles the TV and sound system. Saved us $100 and the world some e-waste.
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My fancy toaster came with dire warnings to not leave it plugged in when it’s unsupervised, presumably because the cut-off on the mechanical timer can fail. Instead I plugged it into a smart socket with an automation to kill the power if there’s a continuous draw for more than 4 minutes.
Not for fun but probably my most pointless. Other than when I was testing it I don’t expect this automation to ever fire.
That did used to be a reasonably common failure scenario for mechanical toasters. I would have hoped it’s not anymore
One of the dumb things my girlfriend and I do is call out one another for forgetting about Dre.
I have a Home Assistant automation that simply sends the following message as a notification to her phone:
“Reporters are on the scene in [redacted], where earlier today, blue collar workers encountered a Florida woman who forgot about Dre.”
I didn’t set any triggers, just manually ran it while she was at home after our air conditioner was serviced.
Our assistant speaker tells us… “Your shit’s clean” and “Your shit’s dry” a few minutes after the washer/dryer stop (just using power consumption stopping). Useful I guess but generally you can hear them stop. It was more for comedic value than anything else.
I have a couch light turn on when I sit down at a certain spot on the couch after sunset at 30% using an “Everything Presense sensor” totally to play with my wave tech
My laundry automations send phone notifications to my girlfriend.
“Front load washer’s got a big, wet load for you.”
“Dryer’s got a hot load ready for you to take.”
We have notifications sent to all our phones when the washer is done, and based on who’s home, there’s also a tts announcement on certain speakers.
Same. Ours also uses a timer to re-check in 15 minutes if nobody is home. That way one of us gets alerted when we’re actually home and can do something about it.
It also doesn’t alert us between 11pm and 8am so we don’t get woken up if we start a late night load.
Due to two things:
- The fact that our washer and dryer are actually out in our garage.
And,
- We live in a very hot and humid area, which accelerates mold and mildew.
We just don’t start loads that will be unattended, even for a few hours. Because laundry left in the washer for even as little as an additional 45 minutes will need, at a minimum, to be rewashed, or possibly even just completely thrown out, as our clothes would have begun to get very mildewed indeed.
Yuck. Makes me glad ours are in our relatively dry basement. But with them down there we used to forget about loads we started until I set up the notifications.
At one of my jobs of scripting, I remember hearing about somebody using “eject” Linux command to make an adjacent computer reboot.
oh that one is a classic, here is a telling but it was old in 2007 when this was written
I’m using a few numpads as simple remote controls for HA, and I got a bit carried away and set 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 to set the alarm clock time for the following morning.
Never used it, I always just set the alarm time through the UI
I built a pressure plate in my bed so when I get in bed after the sun has gone down it puts my adaptive lighting in sleep mode, and turns off all the lights in the house.
I never understood how people can do this unless they live alone.
I specifically have two automations that I run as I’m getting in bed (manually, either through a widget on my phone or via voice command): one for if I’m the last person in bed and one of my wife is still up and hasn’t come to bed yet so it doesn’t turn out all the lights on her.
I broke my daughters cuckoo clock so I gutted it, replaced the circuits with a pi and made a HASS interface so I can adjust the cuckoo/alarm/nightlight times from a webpage.
I mean. I tell HA “To play that song I like” and it plays “Lone Digger” by Caravan Palace. Back in the olden days of Google Home I had a routine called “shut up” that would turn off the mic if I told it to (if a show or audio playing mentioned “hey google”.
