For me, my favourites are definetely some light automations, namingly

• motion detectors and window sensors (where there aren’t insect nets) turning on and off the lights
• adaptive lighting automations setting brightness and shade based on the time

more than that

• turning down the (usually somewhat loud) music in the bathroom when I open the window to the street
• running the vaccuum when I’m not at home
• heating automations adapting to the weather report, presence, time and user preset

my future idea is to copy a nuki opener with an esp-32.

The ones I feel I get the most out of are the text to speech reminders that play in the whole house with all of the activities and chores that needs to be done.

Kids laundry days, activities, unpacking clothes, homework etc.

Reads everything from a shared Google Calender.

Automating the kids evening routines is also a good one. Cutting of the network access to TV:s and reminding them it’s time to go to bed.
Always there and help them with it but it cuts down on nagging and the argumentation surrounding how long they have watched TV and so on.

Putting on their evening music on a timer, adjusting the volume, lights.

Besides that and the regular lights on/off routines in the whole house the presence simulation when we are away is also a good one.

Having problems with getting object detection working on the Yellow via Google Coral though, rumours say it’s doable but no one has actually got it working so I am starting to think it’s BS.

I think my favorite “automation” is actually one of the most simple. There’s a button next to my garage door I press when leaving the house. It just shuts down all the things I want off. No lights lights left on I know the doors are locked etc

I’ve enjoyed using it for a room controller for my AV distribution system. one of those perpetually unfinished work in progress projects and money-sinks.

So a few little wall mounted android things running fully kiosk browser, each one with it’s own room control panel using the WallPanel add-on from HACS to get a customisable toolbarless view, card-mod for some custom CSS and a few other tweaks, also node-red running to do some logic, sequencing and handling the REST commands that are a pain to implement directly in HA. Each room panel has control over lighting, climate, TV and Audio. Each room has a TV connected to a 8x8 HDMI2.0 matrix with a selection of Nvidia Shields, TV and Sat tuners and an appleTV, along with a dedicated dashboard with weather, rain radar and camera views. This is all done in lovelace with custom navigation buttons instead of a toolbar in a simple grid layout with minimal options per page.

So when a user taps the media icon in their room, they get a list of available sources for the TV, guest rooms only have one Nvidia shield available (specifically for guest users) and the main bedrooms get their personal one. The shared living areas and theatre have access to any source so any user can pull up their dedicated shield with their content, apps and accounts.

This also means that I can push any video source to any room intelligently, so I can have a party mode that mirrors every screen, or use any form of presence detection to send a doorbell image to the nearest TV, or a surveillance feed, I just haven’t implemented any of that as I dont need to yet.

The only difficulty is remotes, currently I’m using super cheap hacked OneForAll remotes with custom codes and macros, but if someone selects a source on the touch panel they have to select it again on the remote to get control, so mostly people change source with the remote as I have that set up in a macro. I despise using touch devices as a remote control. If I can get a smarter remote solution worked out I’ll do it, it would require a man in the middle to process remote commands from the IR system, recognise the room it is in and the active source in that room and forward on the right commands to the matrix for distribution. possible, but a pain as I’d have to program it from scratch on an arduino or esp32, or more likely one per room.

Current favorite is an automatic bathroom vent fan for when i’m in the shower.

In Progress, needs tweaking:
Making sure our AC only turns on when it can efficiently cool the house. Useful when we dip into the 50’s for lows while it’s 70’s+ during the day. Basically switch the thermostat to heat only to avoid the AC coming on.

In the planning stage:
Presence sensing in our bathroom to turn the light on for my dad in the middle of the night. Can’t use PIR motion detection as my dad moves very slow these days and actually defeats the PIR sensor in our hallway night light. I’m thinking mmWave is the way to go. Might try presence sensing when someone is on the toilet, turn the fan on, again, because sometimes he forgets.

Just getting started really with automations right now.

I have A LOT of automations. Some of my favorites are:

• Automatically set “house state” (morning, day, evening, night, not home, etc.") based on alarm state, time of day, last movement, etc - this state controls a lot of other automations
• Push message to my phone if outside camera detect a person when house state is “night” or “not home” (using Frigate for object detection)
• Automatically turn off lights at night or when not home. Automatically set lights to right level when home
• Push message when window has been open for more than 20 minutes.
• Push message if windows or doors are open when leaving the house or at night
• Push message with “morning update” and “evening update”. Including today’s weather, if I should sell some stocks as price has reached threshold, etc.

Basically, I no longer has to remember to turn on of off lights and if I forget something important in the house (such as an open window or turning on the alarm), it reminds me to do so (if it can’t do it itself)

I did a few small automation for my car and the charger.

When I plug in the charger at home, it will check the current electricity prices and if below a certain threshold it will setup a plan to charge in those hours.

I also have a button I can press to make a plan depending on how many kwh I need as well as when I need it.

It will then automatically start and stop the charger based on these plans