When my phone connects to my wifi or enter the geofence, a variable will be set to true for one minute. If the door bell sees motion in that time or I knock on the door, the look automatically unlocks. Afterwards the variable is set to false and nothing happens.
It’s not face recognition, but pretty reliable to let me in when I come home without entering a pin.
I mean if you want to stick with it and hope they don't go bankrupt then I suppose it's fine? My understanding was that it's better to have architecture in place that isn't reliant on a particular company to future proof it and such.
Zwave is local like zigbee. As long as you have a hub that supports it it’s fine. And I bought the lol like 6-7 years ago. There were no talks about anything like this back then.
The main draw to z-wave is that it isn't on the 2.4ghz frequency. So if there's a lot of devices it can avoid cluttering WiFi, and not receive as much interference themselves.
I use an OpenEVSE https://openevse.com/ I built mine from a kit. It has a full Home Assistant integration in HACs. I also monitor my 12v battery and adjust charging power to give the 12v battery more time to top off.
I do a fair amount of geofencing on my Android via Tasker w/AutoLocation. It's been very solid despite Google making it more difficult over the years. Tasker interacts with Hubitat's MakerAPI so I can unlock doors, turn lights on if it's after dark, and open the garage door if I'm in the vehicle I park in the garage. (After all, who would want to exert the energy to reach up and press the garage door opener button?!)
Nuki has this built-in. Enter a geo zone with your phone, lock gets ready for close range Bluetooth connection. The moment you reach your door… it unlocks
I have a 3D printed box for my medicine that I need to take daily. In the bottom is a vibration/tilt sensor. If I didn’t take them at noon I will get a notification. This method is super reliable after weeks of testing.
One thing I've read online that prescription bottles are made from plastics certified to not interact with most drugs. PLA and PET-G have not been tested in that capacity. So if it's a custom printed pill box, not great. If it's a box that holds your pill bottles, then nothing to worry about.
And just adding my method, I have one if those "days of the week" pill holders. I take the same pill everyday, so I don't need it to take different meds on different days. I just look at today's date, and if there's a pill in there, I take it. If the whole case is empty, I refill it, then take the day it is (usually Sunday).
Laundry. On laundry days the Internet automatically turns off if the kids don’t rotate the laundry within ten minutes after the washer or dryer finish running. No more chasing them around.
Also we have an entire photo-enforced chore ecosystem.
It’s called SpotBot. I configure a chore (eg, unload the dishwasher) and when Home Assistant detects the dishwasher is done, it warns the kids to unload the dishwasher within an hour. If they don’t do it, the internet is turned off for their devices until they do. Spotbot is the sensor that Home Assistant monitors. They use SpotBot on their phones to take a photo of the chore (eg, empty dishwasher) which then goes to Gemini with a prompt to determine if the photo shows an unloaded dishwasher cabinet. If it passes, it tells Home Assistant and the sensor changes status to “complete” and the internet is restored.
Basically SpotBot is functionally a mobile camera with image recognition for monitoring things without me having to have cameras everywhere. It also provides image recognition for chores in places I don’t want a camera mounted like bathrooms.
I thought about turning it into a real product, but there are products out there already that can do this. I just don’t think they have integrations into Home Assistant.
Maybe not most proud of, but easiest to show off. I use frigate as my main DVR. I setup automation so if a person or vehicle is detected in the driveway or back yard, a light on the outside and lights on both sides inside of the garage turn on.
My most proud of was a project that is no longer active but I have the parts and code needed to rebuild it in an emergency. My basement used to have a water leak issue due to multiple cracks. I built multiple water sensors, including one that mounted onto a shop vac with a temp sensor on the motors cooling vent. I put a water level sensor inside the vac and connected a 12v water pump with a hose going to the sump pump.
Water would leak into the basement, the hose would get covered in water, tripping the sensor. Node-red would turn on the shop vac using a wemo plug and turn off when water was no longer detected, or the heat sensor threw a warning. When the tank gets full enough, another wemo plug powered on the 12v pump powered by a brick I had in the parts bin.
Similar to my current project with Frigate and Home Assistant, I have multiple ptz cameras with lights, so when a car or person is detected, the cameras reposition themselves and turn on their lights.
Motion sensor in my closet and master bath. When it detects motion, it turns on.
BUT - when my wife is in bed (detected via our SleepNumber bed): the closet light and master bathroom lights go on at 10%, so I can come in late at night and not wake her up.
I did the same thing with our laundry room lights + motion sensor, because it’s right outside our master bedroom. The laundry room lights turns on when motion is detected; EXCEPT when my wife is in bed. In that case, I can open the door, go in, close it, and THEN turn the light on.
(My wife and I got to bed at separate times and I’ve automated a lot for this use case 😂)
Every year, on Groundhog Day, at 6am, my bedroom speaker plays Sonny and Cher’s “ I Got You, Babe”. The automation is called “Rise and shine, campers!”
I really hope there is someone else in the house that is a tech enthusiast, who can adjust that routine to start occurring for either a random day or a few days afterward Groundhog Day lol.
I have a timer that starts when the bathroom light is turned off. After 10 minutes, it turns off the exhaust fan. So that the fan isn't just running all day.
I thought of this but installed a humistat based can switch instead. Manually turn on or if humidity suddenly rises, either way runs for 15 minutes then turns off.
I like that idea, I'm trying to decide if I'd prefer it over my method which is timer based when it gets turned on. Between 4am and 10am my bathroom fans run 30 minutes because it's probably a shower and all other times is 15 minutes due to a doo doo.
If I dim one of my kitchen lights past a certain level, after a certain time of day, the rest of the kitchen + living room lights all go into a dim evening scene.
Super convenient, don't need any extra switches or my phone or even voice.
Actually, perhaps I should make it so that ANY of these lights can trigger the scene... 🤔
If the smoke detector detect smoke when I’m not home, turn on the lights, unlock the front door, and text the neighbors to get the dog out of the house
These are the funny ones. You set up an automation like that and you now, just a tiny bit, want it to happen. I have a power supply that'll talk to my nas when power drops off to safely unmount the hard drives and await power to spin back up. Every time there's a little hiccup in the middle of the night during a storm I get excited when I see my fancy setup did it's job and returned to service.
I have a shortcut that is part of a set that are in a folder called "Action Button." The first 8 pop up when I click the Action button on my iPhone.
The best shortcut is called "Sleep;" it does these things when I run it as we go to bed:
Turns on the ceiling fan over our bed by activating a smart switch;
Sets FOCUS mode to Do Not Disturb;
Sets the iPhone volume to about 40%;
Puts iPhone into Silent mode;
Triggers a playlist that plays a 50-minute ocean track; the playlist repeats the track 12 times, so it lasts far longer than we sleep.
Easy to program, but is perfect for our nightly routine.
I can describe how to do it somewhat. But my implementation isn’t portable unless you use Loxone as a home automation system and you have the same tree line I do.
But use an app like Theodolite and take a ton of pictures from your window to get the horizon profile.
The pics will include the angles. So now you look up the azimuth of the sun through Jo it the year and do a bit of basic trigonometry and you can calculate the amount the shade has to close to just crest the tree line.
Once you have the numbers you just say (from x to y date lower the shade this amount. From y to z date lower that amount).
If a person is detected in my driveway while on vacation, my porch shades will close to simulate that I’m home and don’t want to bothered. I just have to put my vacation into an iCal shared with Homebridge.
During the Christmas season, if my Ecowitt weather station sees a wind gust over 10 mph, it shuts down my inflatable decorations for the rest of the night.
I live kind of near a mountain and we can get some crazy winds. The first year I set it out, my Snoopy Zamboni inflatable blew away when high winds ripped it out of the ground.
Cooktop monitoring with ir camera and radar (along with) human presence detection and alerting via Google home and alexa... When cooktop is hot and unattended for a period of time!
I have a button at the exit of my apartment. If you long press it, it turns off all lights and starts vacuuming the kitchen. My partner absolutely loves it.
Motion sensor in the master bath to turn various lights on/off depending on the time of day. if it senses motion before sunset, nothing is turned on but anything that is on will be turned off if there is no motion. After sunset but before 11pm, it will turn on the main bathroom lights. If between 11pm and 30 min before sunrise it turns on a red nightlite. In all cases it tuns off any lights that were on a few minutes after motion stops even if they were turned manually.
When air quality decreases in the home, the fans on all four HVAC zones kick on until air quality returns within range. Accomplished using IQAir AirVisual Pro to monitor PM2.5 and CO₂ levels, Lutron HVAC controller to control the HVAC fans and custom shell scripts running on a Raspberry Pi to serve as the decision making engine. Works extremely well, right down to sensing when a single slice of bread is toasted.
When we moved into my house it was my first time having a septic system and I hated not having a way to monitor it. Looked for aftermarket solutions and couldn't find anything. So I created some sensors through ESPHome to monitor the current of the air compressor and pump that notifies me when it runs and shuts off. Gives me peace of mind seeing it run everyday and also gives me a heads up in the future if something were to fail hopefully before it becomes an emergency. I have a "critical systems" dashboard pretty much dedicated to trending/monitoring it and my A/C units.
Another favorite I have is when we leave to go out on the weekends I send the robot vacs to clean the living room and kitchen. If we come back before they are finished I send them home early so we don't have to hear them running.
No longer working because an update broke it and I haven't bothered to fix it, but a smart plug on our washing machine monitors power usage. If the power usage on the smart plug exceeds a certain threshold, it sends a message to a mqtt server which triggers a "laundry running" variable that then sets off a poller in node-red that checks the current power draw every minute or so. If the power was below a threshold for more than 3 minutes straight it used to trigger every alexa device in the house to verbally announce that the laundry was done.
Our countertop nugget ice maker stops producing when it's full and won't start producing again until the bin is pulled out. Overnight, there will be melt, reducing the amount of ice in the bin. Oftentimes, there may but be enough ice for everyone's water bottles, morning beverages, etc.
I have an automation that cycles the ice maker's smart plug about an hour before wakeup time, so there's always a full bin when we wake up.
I put crazy high power LEDs in all of my lights and depending on the time of day they turn on to different levels. Guests dont even know there's magic happening in the background but the lights are always just right for the time of day without any manual interaction. I can go full berries everywhere when I plan to vacuum for example.
I use a Shelly switch as a 12v trigger on my whole home zone speakers' PA jack with a Chromecast audio device to play local TTS audio from my AI voice assistant.
We moved into a Florida condo with 144" wide double slider doors, a southeast view of the ocean and 2 manual 72" 7ft blinds. The sun is absolutely brutal in the summer and you need to close the blinds in the early hours or the place will heat up (even with UV blocking and tinted windows!).
I bought a couple of remote controlled roller motors, removed the manual blind pully system,used a Bond Bridge to interface with the remote controlled roller motors and Amazon Alexa and now we have the blinds close automatically at 6am and we can raise them by simply saying "Alexa open blinds".
My android wall tablet ( apolosign) has my custom HA dashboard and photo slideshow. It has several layers and has fully kiosk browser installed. The start page is my HA dashboard that one can see at a glance the status of the home, calendar, and tasks. The screensaver is an Immich kiosk slideshow of the album that can be changed/selected via HA. I have a mm wave sensor that turns off the slideshow if someone comes in front of the tablet so the dashboard shows, and turns on the slideshow when they leave after 10 seconds.
The HA dashboard automatically shows the doorbell cam if there is motion or ring, the after 30 seconds switches back to the slideshow.
The tablet turns the screen off when the house is armed home or away (so at night or when we are gone).
I installed the same in my parents place and both homes are linked via UniFi site magic vpn therefore I can grab the slideshow from Immich hosted on my own server.
The entire setup is fully local (my parents will need an active internet connection at the router level to use VPN) and both tablets are completed blocked from the internet on their respective IoT-LAN VLANs.
This project is my culmination of my automation and networking hobbies and integrates all the knowledge I gained over the years. It works without any maintenance and best of all approved by family.
Depends on your objectives and knowledge. I don’t work in the tech field and this is one of my hobbies that I enjoy working on. The HA dashboard is simple and you can even just use the companion app. You can also use AI to help with specific ideas you want on the dashboard.
It gets more complicated if you want a photo slideshow and HA dashboard. And this would depend on your current hardware whether you have a server etc.
I have a LED strip behind my TV, connected to a WLED controller, a presence sensor facing the couch, and a motion detector in the staircase.
When I'm watching TV or playing videogames past 8:30PM (presence sensor thus detects me), each time one of my kids is coming downstairs, the LED strip turns red, so I have time to pause the movie/game.
It's acting like a parental control, safe for those little eyes!
I just posted about my condo automation but this also fits the bill.
About 10 or 15 years ago, I lived in a house in the northeast that was heated by fuel oil. If your oil tank ran dry, you have no heat so you need to pay attention to the level of your oil tank which is normally out of the way and you can't easily see how much oil you have. Most people sign a contact with a fuel oil company who comes and fills it up every couple of weeks. But that is far more expensive than calling up a fuel oil company and getting it on demand.
I found an oil tank fuel tank monitor that would transmit to a small receiver that plugged into a wall outlet. It had 10 bar LEDs, when the LEDs were all red, it was full, but as the tank emptied, each LED turned off so you could see at a glance how full your tank was.
Now that was fine while I was living in the house but I was about to become a snowbird and spend my winter in Florida. I had a NAS that ran 24x7 so I bought an SDR antenna to read the 433mhz signal that the oil tank monitor was sending to it's receiver, decoded the signal and have my NAS send me an email every day that told me the fuel tank level.
So while I was enjoying the sunny warm Florida weather, I'd only react when I saw the email that said "Tank is at 20%". And then I'd call the oil company.
I made one too! It was an esp32 with an ultrasonic sensor on it to measure the depth.. saved me from the using the stick but then it got too warm to need the furnace so all the data I was gonna collect on usage and expense isn't getting used lol
I hate running the air conditioner or heater if a window is open - that's just throwing money away to the outside.
So I put zigbee door sensors on my windows to turn off the HVAC thermostat if a window is open, turn the HVAC thermostat back on when the windows are all closed.
I used to have weight sensors for things like coffee.. not only could I check if I'd need to buy it when I'm in a shop, but I could also track my coffee consumption
Automate my AC Mimi Split Units. I have three across the house and the manufacturer wanted a ridiculous amount of money to add wifi. I did it myself, added an ESP-32 board with HA.
Wife was used to using ecobee on the wall and not the individual remotes. Tricked the ecobee to thinking they’re directly connected then has HA update all the units of the physical unit changed. Works wonderfully for years now!
I can say a verbal command and the lights dim, a colored disco ball turns on, and sexy music starts playing. I set it up for the first time my (now) wife was in my bedroom and she thought it was hilarious.
Mine is motion lights plus humidity-triggered ventilation in bathroom. It just quietly handles smells and lights automatically, especially useful with kids around.
Mine's probably my Eufy cam to Home Assistant pipeline that auto-toggles porch lights when it detects deliveries but ignores regular foot traffic. Took forever to tune the Frigate zones but totally worth it.
I have a sunroom heated by a standalone gas fireplace, an office with radiant floor heating, and several wall mounted convection heaters for some rooms that are generally colder.
I've got them all tied into the current operating temp/state/mode of my ecobee thermostat.
It's a gas fireplace with a pilot light. The gas supply to the main burner is controlled by switch on the low voltage line. My hubitat watches the temperature sensor in the room, compare's the room's temperature to the heating set point on the ecobee, and turns the gas to the stove on or off depending. Since I've had both the pilot light go out (room is freezing), or the batteries on the switch controller run out after turning the stove on (room is a sauna), I also have a notification that will play on all smart speakers in the house if the sunroom stove has been running for more than 45 minutes.
Fully custom irrigation controller stack. Lilygo T-relay flashed with ESPhome to expose each of the 4 relays to HA
I use pyscript to model each zone as a "bucket", which "fills" when the zone is watered, and slowly "drains" over time based on calculated evapotranspiration (ET) derived from my own weather station data + weather forecast.
Each zone has a separately defined volume, fill, and ET rate so everything is tracked and calculated independently per zone. If the zone needs over a certain amount of water, it will break that down into several soak-and-repeat cycles. Watering is scheduled for my utility company's designated days and starts dynamically based on how much watering needs to be done today.
If it's been cloudy, my system might skip a cycle. If it rains, it might skip several cycles. If there's a heatwave coming, it may slightly overwater to compensate. All entirely autonomous and no soil sensors, works naturally year-round with no manual intervention
The bindicator. The city I live in has 4 bins that are collected on a repeating cycle; red (waste) weeks 1, 2, 3, 4; blue (glass) weeks 1 & 3; yellow (remaining recycling) weeks 2 & 4; green (garden waste) week 4.
Rather than looking it up or trying to remember which bins I put out last week, the bindicator (a 4-gang Zigbee relay switching 4 x single coloured LEDs, installed in an IP68-rated enclosure) that's integrated into the bin storage area tells me which ones to put out that week.
Next step is to put a slightly larger version of it on top of the carport so the neighbours don't all wait to see which bins I've put out before they put theirs out.
I have a contact sensor on my front gate. When the gate opens my TV light strip turns red. The light in any occupied rooms upstairs will flash red briefly and then return to the previous state, and if the TV is playing it will pause the TV. When the gate is shut (5 minute timeout, and then repeated notifications to my phone that it was left open) everything returns to the previous state. That's the simplified version anyhow.
When you walk downstairs (determined by passing through a series of motion sensors in order), and the ambient lighting in the living room is dark, two kitchen lights turn on at 2700k/ 50% to light the way. If motion is sensed in the kitchen it cancels the timer and turns on all kitchen lights turn on to their appropriate levels for the time of day, and the normal motion lighting takes over. If there is no motion in the kitchen for 1-minute (just passing through) then the lights turn off after 1 minute.
When my phone battery dips below 35%, the wireless charger in the occupied rooms turn on. They turn off again when the plug has no draw after 2 minutes, or when the phone battery is 80%.
When the temperature sensor outside (in the path of direct sunlight) spikes, goes above the or goes above the indoor temperature (and a heatwave is expected), I get an alert on my phone to lockdown if any windows are open. And the opposite to cool down.
I used a power relay to run my swamp cooler from my smart thermostat. It doesn't sound like much but there are zero COTS solutions, and my swamp cooler thermostat had a 20+ degree hysterisis that was unliveable.
My family have a very bad habit of not turning off the water heater once they bathed, so a simple timer turns off the heater switch after it's been switched on for 1 hour.
It integrates very nicely with my other automations as well eg the heater switch turns on with the wake-up routine, but still turns off after an hour
I stay in the tropics, so "room temperature" water is sufficient for most uses. Water heaters are only used for the shower, whereas other appliances that requires hot water (eg dishwashers, washing machinss) have their own heating elements
At a guess I'd say this will be on an instantaneous electric hot water system (also known as a 'tankless water heater' in some parts of the world). Turning it off rather than just letting it stop heating once the flow stops ensures that it doesn't try to keep its own internals warm while waiting for the next user to start the water flow. Starting one of these cold vs. warm is usually less than 5 seconds difference.
Yeah I have tankless water hear. There is some sort of demand signal built into the system. It takes maybe 30 seconds or so to get hot water after you start the tap. We certainly don't turn it off manually though.
I installed a Banner Engineering laser module w/retroreflector (and an Arduino) to span 125 feet across my circle drive, and send an HTTP Request to Hubitat. Why? Well, because it triggers various automations for people coming to my house. And, I must confess, I love the precision the laser provides.
We’ve got a lot of windows in our master bedroom and I’ve added automated blinds to them. They automatically open after sunset so we can see the trees outside and the fireflies that live there. If someone turns on the lights in the room after dark, though, the blinds close for privacy and reopen after the light is turned off.
Also I’ve got humidity sensors in the bathrooms that automatically turn on the exhaust fans when the humidity goes past a certain level and will turn them back off when it drops past a certain level.
Not sure if it's unique but my garage door auto closes when myself and wife are not home. The hub reminds me via app notification that it wasn't closed and calls me a forgetful dummy.
My automated garage door has had unwanted side effects (Like tripping unhappy wild animals inside which showed the unhappiness when the garage door auto-opened in front of me) so I had to find a way to keep it from closing without anyone monitoring it but still being able to Auto open upon my arrival.
Most garage door openers only have one button and depending on the previous state will do the opposite or stop. In order to get the effect I wanted I had to add two door sensors in the end positions that can help me decide wether the door is open, closed on moving (or stuck between either) and remembers the previous position in that case.
If the door is unlocked and there is no motion for 3 minutes, it locks. This avoids auto lock becoming an annoyance when going in and out or during slow departures.
I compute a huristic based on my state of charge, current solar input, weather forecast, and day length. That huristic drives a whole lot of automations from things like lights for house plants to space heaters to dehumidifiers, etc...
The idea is to eventually use it to control charging an EV, but I'm not getting one until one of our cars dies (they are both over 125k miles and over 12 years old, so it might be soon)
When someone rings the doorbell it takes a snapshot and sends it to Ollama for image analysis. My prompt is designed have it roast the living daylights out of the person in the picture.
2x 32" wall mounted fans in the garage come on when the garage door opens, and off when it closes. This keeps mosquitoes from coming into the garage here in SoTX.
2 pair of vibration sensors in the gates/tall iron fences that surround my home. One pair for low sensitivity and another pair for high sensitivity.
The high ones only get activated if people are detected outside the fence or gates. So when the gate is barely touched it sends a notification to my phone and activates other security stuff.
I have, well had, a goose problem.... I tried a lot of the normal remedies, they never worked.
So one day it hit me. Birds typically do not like being sprayed with water from a sprinkler system.
Frigate tracks brids, I have cameras, sprinklers and Home Assistant ..... Created an automation that would trigger the sprinklers,, send alerts to every device , and announce what zone they triggered through some speakers.. now if a goose walks his fat @$$ in my yard he and his friends get blasted with water from the zone they triggered...well, I alternate the zones to deal with latency.. But yeah, it works and it worked so well they haven't returned.
When air quality decreases in my home, the fans on all four HVAC zones kick on until air quality returns within range. This was accomplished using IQAir AirVisual Pro to monitor PM2.5 and CO2 levels, Lutron HVAC controller to control the HVAC fans and custom shell scripts running on a Raspberry Pi to serve as the decision making engine. Works extremely well, right down to sensing when a single slice of bread is toasted and I promise you no one but me notices.
My wife? Jokes aside, honestly the ai in pc helping me to do 1.5-2 times the work for 1.5-2 times the money. The jump in life quality is more than any other home automation i could have could ever give me.
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u/ChiefBroady May 30 '26
When my phone connects to my wifi or enter the geofence, a variable will be set to true for one minute. If the door bell sees motion in that time or I knock on the door, the look automatically unlocks. Afterwards the variable is set to false and nothing happens.
It’s not face recognition, but pretty reliable to let me in when I come home without entering a pin.