a1studmuffin

Liquid Trees! Slam it down fast!

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/fsr-the-best-bed-occupancy-sensor/365795

This is the best write-up I’ve seen - essentially a force sensitive resistor on the bed slats and an ESP32 will get you the results you’re after.

I had a good experience with Daikin split systems, but it’s really going to depend on your region and what’s available in your area, or what you’ve already got. If you’re looking for inspiration on what works well, check the Home Assistant forums.

Best place to start would be to look at the thermostat hardware you’ve currently got, and start searching online if anyone has integrated it into Home Assistant.

I’ve lived at a few houses now with Home Assistant. In all of them I was able to integrate my HVAC and automate it, but some brands and hardware are definitely easier than others.

I think the most extreme of them required a custom esphome device connected to its PCB to talk to Home Assistant, and another required me to write my own custom component.

Hardware and brands make a huge difference, but sometimes you’re stuck with what you’ve got.

Just to play devil’s advocate, why do you want to automate your lighting? I’d consider myself an advanced HA user (been using it since 2019 and have coded several custom integrations and built custom hardware) and never bothered with automating my home lighting. I’m always walking past the light switch as I enter or exit a room anyway, so it’s not a big inconvenience.

The real wins I’ve gotten from HA are smarter home security (door locks/sensors/cameras etc), climate control, energy management, garden irrigation, and remote control of “dumb” devices like my garage door and motorised front gate.

Edit: thanks for the insights all! Seems having kids and older houses are common reasons for automating lighting.

I’m no expert but just helping you kick the tires a little bit - for the audio outs, are you thinking of just running speaker wire from an amp in the server closet to the ceiling of all of the audio out locations?

For what it’s worth, I’ve dabbled with wifi/Bluetooth speakers and while they generally work well, there always seems to be some software update or connectivity dropouts enough that I’d much prefer a wired system to eliminate over-the-air issues for a long-term robust solution.

The way I implemented this strategy was to make sure I had a single cigarette and lighter on me at all times. I named the cigarette, which psychologically helped prevent me from smoking it. I stuck that out for a few months until a friend smoked it in desperation. At that point I felt confident I’d quit because I wanted to, not because of random circumstance.

Another vote for Mikrotik, but only if you’re technical-minded and want to learn how routers work. One of the things I like the most about it is the ability to import/export the router config as plain text. That makes it very easy to do things like bulk-editing (I have a lot of IOT devices I need to configure), storing your config in version control for safe-keeping etc.

Removed by mod

It’s a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries split system. The two options I had were an IR blaster or a DIY ESPhome-based module plugged directly into the unit that controls it over the SPI bus. I opted for the latter as it gives full status info in addition to control.

I’ve also got a Samsung unit in another room that I can control. For that one I use SmartThings… not ideal as it goes through the cloud, but I’ll take what I can get.

If you’ve got an old-school heater, you might have luck with some of the smart thermostats designed to be retrofitted into old houses.

Edit: just looked up your heaters online. Since you’ve got a lot of them, and they look pretty old, I’m guessing the smart controllers are just acting as relays. So yeah perhaps an ESP32 relay module would be the way to go! Once you’ve got the code working for one, you could roll them out to the rest. You’d need some confidence working with relays and electronics of course.

The simplest automations are the best. An hour before I typically get up, if the bedroom is too cold, turn on the heater.

Slight tangent, but I recently cleaned out the house of a parent after they passed away. There were boxes and boxes of family photo albums. We kept them for a while out of guilt, but we really didn’t know anyone in the photos aside from one or two people. Eventually we got rid of them. Point being the value of your stuff is probably far less to others then it is to you, especially photos to future generations.

Very reassuring to see how quickly the security issues were resolved, awesome work Home Assistant!

I’m confused why the IP address of a resource is changing for you when you’re moving in/out of the wireguard tunnel? In my setup the LAN IP addresses always stay the same whether I’m on the local network or accessing remotely, It’s just the route to them that changes (over a different ethernet adapter). Perhaps that’s what you meant, or there’s some crazy configs out there I’m unaware of.

Q. How do you know an open source project is written in Rust?

A. Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.

It’s up to you to make it cloudless, but Home Assistant is the only solution I know of out there that even allows this possibility. I refuse to use anything in my home that requires a third party app or cloud connection (aside from initial pairing so I can flash it with ESPHome or some other local-only firmware). Admittedly it complicates things, but the payoff is so worth it.

And it’s so nice having zero dependence on the cloud. If the internet drops out, everything still works, including the mobile app.

Between this and gutter oil (Google it, or actually maybe don’t), it sure doesn’t leave me with a great impression of China and hygiene.

Similar story here, it’s a great idea until it goes wrong, then you’ve got two appliances down instead of one.

My Home Assistant instance has become so mission critical to my household that I’ve got a dedicated Pi 4 for it, with a fallback Pi 4 and preflashed SD card ready to hot swap and restore from backup.

This is a feature, not a bug. But we definitely need a solution to make subscribing/coalescing them easier for users. Mastodon allows subscribing to topics (hashtags) - I think something similar is needed here, but that will evolve naturally over time.