I was reading the HA roadmap and thinking about the points where everyone (else) interacts with my HA environment. I’ve wanted displays/dashboards for a long time but mostly have either battery powered buttons or smart wall switches. These are good in that I can automate them but with two teenage children we have a lot of variability.
Tell me how everyone else uses HA in your house. Do they love it? Do they see only that buttons ‘do things’? Do they read dashboards and crave data?
I’ve gone way too far down the automation path.
All manner of temperature, humidity, occupancy, motion, and air quality sensors make all sorts of things do appropriate responses.
For example, I’ve got a mmwave motion/occupancy sensor in the bathroom, and if there’s no motion/occupancy and the humidity is more than 5% higher than the hallway sensor, then turn on the exhaust fan until it’s not.
Or, if the air particulate count in the kitchen is too high, turn on the exhaust fan until it’s not.
Or, if the living room is occupied, and the tv is on and playing media, turn the overhead lights off and turn the RGB accent light on very dimly. And if the media is paused or stopped, increase the brightness of the RGB lighting so you can see where you’re walking, and if it stays paused or stopped for more than 10 minutes, turn the main lights back to whatever state they were in before media playback started.
No dashboards though, since the goal is essentially that you don’t have to think about what is going on, because it should Just Work™ and never be something you have to deal with.
…though, really, I’d say we’re at like 80% successful with that.
For manual interactions I’ve got a bunch of NFC tags in various places that will trigger the appropriate automation in the case that you either want to do it by hand or it fails to do the needful, plus the app is configured to allow manual control of any device and to trigger specific automations.
Some cool examples there, I’m going to think about them. I particularly like the walking ones.
I want to love dashboards. I love the idea of a control centre in each room but I just can’t get to the point of winning with them
Are you using node red or keeping all of this native?
Both!
The native automation is perfectly cromulent for what I want, usually, but there’s a couple of cases where the integrations either don’t exist or don’t return meaningful data.
FOR EXAMPLE, the video playback in the living room thing. Sure, the roku integration says “something is playing” but it’s shockingly wrong and unreliable. What happens is it falls into ‘idle’ status between videos, or if you’re fast forwarding sometimes and thus the automation was not doing exactly what I wanted.
The Jellyfin API, though, can look at the living room tv user and is spot on as to what is going on with play/pause/stopped statuses, so I have node red yank that data direct from the API and it works great.
I don’t quite get the NFC tags thing. Does this mean you have a tag on your wall that you tap your phone on? Is this something you prefer doing over opening home assistant on your phone and clicking the appropriate button? Not being critical or anything, I just see it mentioned often but I can’t really conceptualise why it’s a thing, and I’m curious what I might be missing.
Yeah, I’m just using some cheap NFC stickers from Ali Express.
The thing is that I don’t use the dashboard: not every action has a dashboard entry and even if there is one, the amount of time it takes to load the app, open the correct dashboard tab, and then click a button is like, 10x the time of ‘tap your phone on the NFC tag, and thing happens’.
On Android anyway: iOS requires you endlessly tap ‘Yes, yes I’m sure I meant to do that it’s fine just do it already’ for NFC triggered actions, and on Android, it just goes ‘boink’ and does it.
TLDR: it’s super faster than hitting a button on the dashboard.
I think I’d still prefer actual buttons if I went that route, but I think I kind of get it. Can this be made to work with a smart watch too?
People in my household have two uses for HA. The first one is automated lights: you walk in — the lights are on, you walk out — you forget that you were ever in the room, the second use is finer control (colour, brightness, temperature) using a simple dashboard for lights that have a physical on/off switch.
I’ve provided integration to HomeKit so the tech savvier ones have set up their own automations such as turning on the lights in their room when their alarm goes off.
In return I get to spy on everyone :3
In my room I’ve gone crazy, controlling and automating literally everything, without nearly any physical controls.
Fully agree with schizo! Not having to think about things like light, temperature, co2 and the likes is my goal too!
Mostly for controlling lights and heating.
There are a few buttons around the house. For my wife (and kids to play with) the most important ones are the ones controlling the light in the bedroom. There is a motion sensor covering the door and wardrobe area which can be muted with a button (e.g. if the kids have snuck into our bed and we don’t want to wake them or if either one of us goes to bed later). We use mostly the IKEA Zigbee buttons.
We also have a great device called Home Buttons in our kitchen. It uses MQTT and has a fantastic battery life (using a 18650 rechargeable battery). It has an e-ink display and six buttons. I programmed it to display several things (you can use one MDI icon and a short text to display for each button) for everyday use, like switching some lights, displaying temperature and humidity and controlling the climate in our conservatory. You have to press a button for it to update (to save battery - even though it easily lasts months).
The main touch point though is the app. I built three dashboards:
- A general overview that dynamically changed based on events and time of day.
- A floor plan which holds every light, sensor and switch in it.
- A blood glucose dashboard as both one of my daughters as well as myself have diabetes. As I use the same insulin pump as my daughter I cannot use the pump’s app to follow her data as I need the app for myself. So for me this is quite important. My wife uses the pump’s app in follower mode for our daughter.
But I also made Home Assistant send notifications to our smartphones for several events (dishwasher, washing machine, too hot / cold in the conservatory, low blood glucose levels, kids turning on the TV in the morning). Some of them offer to respond with an action others are just reminders that something needs to be done.
My wife appreciates especially the notifications I think because you don’t have to think about some things as they pop up when action is due and we both can more easily share the workload as she gets notified as well when I started the dishwasher without me needing to tell her. (This may sound like we’re not speaking to each other, but we’re just not saying things like I just started the dishwasher can you empty it later.)
Our dishwasher and washing machines take long enough that sometimes that notification is for the same person that started it. I’ve started the dishwasher and then gone about my business doing things, completely forgetting the dishwasher. This way I remember to go unload it and start it again. (We do a lot of cooking/baking at home, so our dishwasher probably gets ran ~2 times on a weekday and sometimes 4+ times on weekend days)
The washing machine is similar. Nice to know there’s wet clothes in the machine that need moved to the dryer so I don’t forget them. I don’t automate the dryer finishing because the clothes in there are fine if they sit.
I’m generally the only one that actually interacts with the app, home assistant basically automates things on schedules and based on temperature and whether anyone’s home or not.
So there’s stuff like:
- preheat the office on cold work days
- make the robot vacuum clean the house if nobody’s home
- turn the AC off if nobody’s home
- turn the night light on in the baby’s room and turn it off in the morning (change the colour when it’s time to wake up)
I guess the goal is to keep the house comfortable while at home, while turning everything off when not to save energy without having to think about it.
While I love data and crave the dashboards, for everyone else:
- things work normally, and the “smart” functionality is added
- my automation is timers
- everything is voice control
I’ve given up persuading anyone to use any of the smart functionality, although I’m likely to get the Apple home hub when it comes out.
I’ve looked into various e-ink projects for dashboards but never had the time to follow through
Check out OpenHasp. I have several WT32-SC01 Plus devices around my house. Using MQTT, you can easily interact with Home Assistant on touch screen devices.
I bought a cheap AIO PC on FB Marketplace and run HA’s front end on it. I also have the thermostat on an Amazon fire.
Each device has its own login so I can update what it sees. Eventually I want a 2F control, 1F control, and maybe use open hasp for thermostats. I’m also going to experiment using a raspberry pi or esp32 and gpio buttons.
If I were going to spend a little more cash I think I’d get a Chromebook that has a detachable screen and use that.
I have a customised dashboard running on a Sonoff NS panel Pro (using the normal methods to get back to stock android on those panels) I just use it as a button pad for a media room, so the dashboard is mostly just a few pages of buttons in a 3x3 grid for source selection, modes, AC and Lighting controls etc, mostly hitting triggers in Node-Red (via the HACS node-red addon) rather than directly in Homeassistant so that it’s easier to have the dashboard trigger perform a larger chain of tasks easier (in my opinion) than doing it purely in HA.
It’s not perfect… because there’s no easy way to lock a dashboard to a certain pixel height and width without a lot of tinkering with third party plug-ins and SSL.
I’ve got it working pretty well, the one gripe I have is tap and hold functions are impossible as the touchscreen seems too sensitive and there is no dead-zone control for tap and hold.
But recently i’ve programmed a new smart remote for the media room that does most of it on the remote directly, so I only use it for configuring the A/C occasionally now, when my remotes simpler on/off integration isn’t enough.
