Home Assistant things you'd miss now; what is a great little thing HA does for you, I'll start.
Home Assistant things you'd miss now; what is a great little thing HA does for you, I'll start.
So last week I had a Proxmox fuckup and lost everything. I learnt the hard way what living without backups is like and I don't recommend it.
Silver lining is that I don't have to tidy up all those old automations and entities anymore.
Anyway it made me realise what I'd miss if I didn't have them, because I didn't have them.
I've been really really tired this week. I get up at 5am and start work at 6, and while I don't like it, I usually cope with it better than most and have comments about how "It's too early for you." But not this week.
I've put it down to losing my connection between my alarm clock and HA. I use SleepAsAndroid and have done for a long time. Back when I started it was because it connected to Tasker, but over the years I've moved to HA and still use it.
SleepAsAndroid with Tasker was done with web hooks but I use the MQTT integration with HA. This means it's connected when I'm home but not in network when I'm away, so it can't fire the messages, which is what you want.
Previously I used Node Red to set up this automation but I haven't reinstalled it yet, I'm seeing if I can do it all on HA, then it's one less thing and I can automate in the app.
I spent a while this morning trying to figure out how to reintegrate it with HA and struggled, but eventually I found an integration in HACS which meant I just had to change my device identifier in the alarm app by adding /MyName to the end of the SleepAsAndroid topic so it reads SleepAsAndroid/MyName, add the HACS integration and then add it again in the Integrations pane, with MyName plumbed in.
Then I added a blueprint from the add ons page and left the house to go on a day trip.
In and amongst the day trip I've been making my automation on the HA app via the blueprint, and have come home, loaded a bowl and set my alarm for 1 minute time, then smoke the bowl and wait...
Success!
Hopefully I'll have more energy this week when I wake up to my lights turning on, instead of complete darkness and a strange noise.
Now what would you miss that isn't obvious (like motion activated lights)?
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Sunset routine every evening, steps through over 150 separate RGB values over 45 minutes. Improved our sleep.
Turn off the cable box every night since the dwvs love to install new updates at 3 Am which iniitaites a restart, which, in turn, illuminates the entire bedroom. An unforgivable sin.
Recently: decided we'd get curtains and make everything smart. It wasn't a bank buster to get a couple gizmos. Night is dark and daytime the curtains open when my wife comes home - giving her the natural light she covets. Makes our humble 1000 Sq ft seem larger, besides.
Now replacing our Google hub with an old old tablet. The S4 seems almost perfect and wallpanel is great. Especially if coupled with ha-Floorplan.
Sunset routine every evening, steps through over 150 separate RGB values over 45 minutes.
Did you use the built-in Flux integration for that? I broke mine recently and it's a real pain having to do it manually!
I did mine manually over a weekend. Built in variable length of time, transition periods and variable brightness vmbased on how bright it is (outside) when it runs.
There's actually 3 sets of 150+ RGBs. They're similar, but on is warmer, one is cooler, meaning the lights aren't all a match.
What did you use for outside brightness? Your own sensor or public weather data?
I live in a place where clouds aren't often a factor, I only used the sun's elevation for that script.
At this point I could modify those values with cloud cover percent, but I haven't.
In short: it's calculated.
There's an integration to Open Weather Map. You have to sign up for an API Key, but it's free. One of the sensors is cloud cover.
Ooh nice, I'll give that a go, cheers!
Nice. I'd like some automated blinds myself for the front room. We have the slat blinds and the sunshine comes through at certain times and blinds (lol) you, would be nice to have them turn through the day to have sunlight without sunshine.
What did you to move the curtains?
Switchbot Curtain 3 for curtain rods. I like them, but carefully made sure they'd never have to climb the telescoping part of the rods. That... That it didn't seem awesome at.
All I did was extend the rods to the side maintaining symmetry and made sure the ridge was at mid-point.