All About Automations

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crashy

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Hey guys,

I'd love to hear the automations that everyone has setup, it's always good to see what's out there to copy.

Spam your automations below.

I'm abit of an automation newbie, and feel like this is the next step for me in my Home Automation journey.

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Geyser / Borehole / Tank Pump / Pool Pump - An automation to turn these on / off based on a calendar schedule. These will also all turn off when there is load shedding.

Alarm - When the alarm is triggered, send the Zone detail to my HA companion app and switch on all the outside lights. [Need to add this to take a picture if possible]

Irrigation - Pretty standard ones here around turning the sprinklers on / off on a schedule. Could do better with checking the weather.
Irrigation - Turn off the water tank pump if the water in the tank is detected as low/empty.

Lights - External lights on / off at sunset / sunrise. All internal lights off at 09:00 (incase lazy kids left them on)

Garage / Office - Turn these lights on based on motion being detected from the Paradox PIR

Cameras - If any of my external cameras (on the road) detect a person from Blue Iris, then send a Telegram picture to me.

Tablet - I have a Samsung A10 (I think) next to me in my office with my dashboard on it. If the Cameras trigger a person, the change the dashboard to the external road cameras. Revert back to the usual dashboard after 60 seconds.

Robovac - Still work in progress here. When my wife leaves to drop the kids at school in the morning (based on phone tracker) then quickly mop the kitchen / dining room.

That's mostly mine, could do with being a lot cleverer, so would love some fresh ideas.
 
Got some automations that I pretty much don't want to live without anymore

Images of persons detected on the perimiter cameras sent to my phone when i'm away, to my pc when that is on. All cameras alert for person detected after 11pm-6am

Garage lights on between sunset-sunrise when a door is opened or motion detected

House lights come on if light sensor drops below certain value, goes off when above certain value. Useful for when there is a heavy storm or very clouded and the house is dark

Pc switch on when I return home, so that when Ive put all my things down my pc is started up

Alarm arms on all doors closed after 10pm, disarms at 6:30

Porch lights turn off when porch door closed after 10:30pm

Tv goes to sound only mode when button pressed - switches off 2 hours later
 
I have recently ordered a Tank level sensor that works with Tuya and therefore automate rather than relying on paid for apps - am excited about that . I also see that there are irrigation control boxes that work with Tuya that can autmate with weather.
 
Adhvik said:
I have recently ordered a Tank level sensor that works with Tuya and therefore automate rather than relying on paid for apps - am excited about that . I also see that there are irrigation control boxes that work with Tuya that can autmate with weather.
Click to expand...

Mind sharing a link for the tank sensor?
 
I am busy assisting a friend that bought a new place. He wants to automate everything from lights to blinds.

What would be the best option for controlling something like this
 
Went_For_Beer said:
What would be the best smart devices

Sonoff
Shelly

I dont really want to flash the devices if at all posible
Click to expand...
They're both great. Sonoff probably a little bit cheaper than Shelly. It would depend on what he wants to do. One of the bonuses of HA is that he doesn't have to choose. He can use any combination his heart desires.
 
I am new to this and really only now doing research. Do you guys use voice control systems like Google assistant or Alexa with your home automation?
 
I only have a few at the moment as I still haven't got to getting HA up and running in our current house, so using basic timer based actions in eWelink and other basic apps...

Lamps on 30 minutes before sunset;
Outside lights on 10 minutes before sunset and off at sunrise;
Pool on and off at set times each day;
One geyser on at a time for an hour, then the next, etc.

At our previous house I had the same with lamps and outside lights but also had...

Lamps off at set times if none of use was home based on cell phone geolocation;
Garage light on for 3 minutes after the garage door was opened;
Outside alarm beams being triggered after sunset and before sunrise would switch outside lights on;
Roof trap door opening would switch on lights in the roof.

I never got my weather station integrated so want to do that in this house, it has a solar radiation reading which I could use to turn lights on and off, as well as to switch off say a geyser or the pool when there is limited sunshine and I need to charge batteries. All plans at this stage though, second son will arrive in a week or two and I have had other financial priorities to cover, so no spare money to do what I want to do.
 
- Warning on phone if I've used more than 500l of water in a day.
- Warning on phone if there is less than 25 kWh on prepaid meter.
- Snapshot and video clip notification on telegram if movement is detected on outside cameras.
- Picture in picture notification on TVs when movement is detected on outside cameras.
- Warning on phone if alarm is not turned on at sunset.
- Automatically run geyser earlier if there is loadshedding in normal running timeslot.
- Turn off TVs when idle for 10min
 
Last edited:
Jakes147 said:
- Warning on phone if I've used more than 500l of water in a day.
- Warning on phone if there is less than 25 kWh on prepaid meter.
- Snapshot and video clip notification on telegram if movement is detected on outside cameras.
- Picture in picture notification on TVs when movement is detected on outside cameras.
- Warning on phone if alarm is not turned on at sunset.
- Automatically run geyser earlier if there is loadshedding in normal running timeslot.
- Turn off TVs when idle for 10min
Click to expand...
What do you use to automate? HA and how did you get PIP on your TV
 
I use Nodered running in its own docker container and connected to HA, slowly but surely moving all the addons off the HA Vm so I can run it as a docker container as well
 
Went_For_Beer said:
Does HA have to be local or can you host in in a private cloud (VPS)
Click to expand...
"
As someone with a lot of networking knowledge who tried it - it is currently impossible to run Home Assistant in the cloud. HA has a monolithic architecture which is regrettably as archaic as it is hard to change at this point in time. The monolith essentially means that HA was never properly split into its separate components (UI, storage, connectivity, integrations) and is therefore in no way capable of running the integrations on another host than the rest. Changing to enable the core system and the persistence layers on a cloud server, attach a number of dynamic integration proxies (of which one on a Pi or Arduino at my home), and then select per integration on which proxy to run it would require a fundamental and very painful refactor or even rewrite of HA.

The alternatives are not viable. While for example Zigbee2MQTT will happily run like this (it’s implictly its own proxy and you can just connect MQTT via VPN or even public internet) integrations that depend on LAN features like discovery - not so much. Setting up a VPN, with a bunch of complex routing rules, will eventually get you to the point where your cloud instance can directly control your Sonos device or whatever. It will however never discover them, as broadcasts are not forwarded by any bridging VPN for very good reasons, and even if you manage to do it (I did in the end) the integrations are most of the time still broken because they assume L2 connectivity features. So you end up with a system that works a lot of the time, or appear to do so, and you cannot rely on it which defeats the entire purpose of a home automation system.

The reason I tried to set it up are simply reliability and stability. When the electricity drops in my house, or the fuse my Pi is connected to blows, or my fiber modem crashes, in a well designed microservices architecture with proper redundancy it should just list the integrations that run there as temporarily unavailable. My Home Assistant should then still be accessible (via 4G/5G if need be), still show web integrations like my calendars and weather reports, hell even my Tesla integration would still work, HA would just be a bit less functional. The idea is awesome. But impossible.

TL;DR: HA is designed to be run as a whole on a single system. Having most of HA run somewhere and just some integrations somewhere else is currently not feasible. If they ever refactor the ‘integration hosting’ away from the core awesomeness can ensue but not today.

(disclaimer: I use the shorthand term ‘in the cloud’ for what it actually means: “a computer of which the physical location is unspecified and unimportant to its use”. This may be a colocated uber-secure personal server, an AWS/GC/DO/Azure machine or a VM from a local vendor, whatever floats your boat. Concerns about specific cloud vendors are irrelevant to this discussion)" https://community.home-assistant.io/t/home-assistant-in-the-cloud/436220/18
 
For those using Frigate to detect people, how many cameras are you running, and for the detector , are you using your CPU or Google Coral?
 
Jakes147 said:
"
As someone with a lot of networking knowledge who tried it - it is currently impossible to run Home Assistant in the cloud. HA has a monolithic architecture which is regrettably as archaic as it is hard to change at this point in time. The monolith essentially means that HA was never properly split into its separate components (UI, storage, connectivity, integrations) and is therefore in no way capable of running the integrations on another host than the rest. Changing to enable the core system and the persistence layers on a cloud server, attach a number of dynamic integration proxies (of which one on a Pi or Arduino at my home), and then select per integration on which proxy to run it would require a fundamental and very painful refactor or even rewrite of HA.

The alternatives are not viable. While for example Zigbee2MQTT will happily run like this (it’s implictly its own proxy and you can just connect MQTT via VPN or even public internet) integrations that depend on LAN features like discovery - not so much. Setting up a VPN, with a bunch of complex routing rules, will eventually get you to the point where your cloud instance can directly control your Sonos device or whatever. It will however never discover them, as broadcasts are not forwarded by any bridging VPN for very good reasons, and even if you manage to do it (I did in the end) the integrations are most of the time still broken because they assume L2 connectivity features. So you end up with a system that works a lot of the time, or appear to do so, and you cannot rely on it which defeats the entire purpose of a home automation system.

The reason I tried to set it up are simply reliability and stability. When the electricity drops in my house, or the fuse my Pi is connected to blows, or my fiber modem crashes, in a well designed microservices architecture with proper redundancy it should just list the integrations that run there as temporarily unavailable. My Home Assistant should then still be accessible (via 4G/5G if need be), still show web integrations like my calendars and weather reports, hell even my Tesla integration would still work, HA would just be a bit less functional. The idea is awesome. But impossible.

TL;DR: HA is designed to be run as a whole on a single system. Having most of HA run somewhere and just some integrations somewhere else is currently not feasible. If they ever refactor the ‘integration hosting’ away from the core awesomeness can ensue but not today.

(disclaimer: I use the shorthand term ‘in the cloud’ for what it actually means: “a computer of which the physical location is unspecified and unimportant to its use”. This may be a colocated uber-secure personal server, an AWS/GC/DO/Azure machine or a VM from a local vendor, whatever floats your boat. Concerns about specific cloud vendors are irrelevant to this discussion)" https://community.home-assistant.io/t/home-assistant-in-the-cloud/436220/18
Click to expand...
Nabu Cassa?

Or is that only for remote access and they don't actually host anything? I've never used Nabu Cassa so don't know how it works
 
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