Salesman at the door button and routine exported to HomeKit. My doorbell camera shows a PiP of a person detection on my AppleTV. If I say “Siri salesman at the door” then HA will briefly turn on the flowerbed sprinkler zone to chase it away. Never gets old.
I click a button when taking my pill so I don’t take it twice by mistake, it also alerts me if I’ve forgotten my dose. Not really ridiculous, but I wanted to feel included lol
Do you have it set to tell you after x amount of pills to pickup new ones and/or see your doc for refills?
I have had complex med schedules for an epileptic cat monitored by HA
frog I can’t even remember to get my meds renewed let alone take them half the time. 30 days of pills last me upwards of 3 months before I get a new bottle. no wonder I’m so messed up
MedTimer (FOSS) and a 7-day pill organizer changed my life.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve had to upgrade to one with AM/PM distinctions to balance the uppers and downers.
Also, you have ADHD. Talk to somebody about it.
Thought of another one…
I bought some TP-Link wifi bulbs that were flaky from the start. After some investigation I discovered that these particular bulbs felt it important to phone home to China every few seconds and became very, very unhappy if the lines were down. After a short tantrum they would reset their wifi connection before regaining consciousness. What that meant in my 3 bulb fixture was that when my “lights off” scene was triggered and my firewall was blocking their corporate masters, one or more of the bulbs was often in a stupor and would remain on indefinitely.
Did I just go spend $25 on some new, decent bulbs that actually worked? Nope - no way some stinking TP-Link bulbs were going to win! Instead I spent hours creating multiple redundant automations that checked for each possible failure state, kept polling the bulbs until their tantrum ended and they regained consciousness, and then turned off whatever bulbs were left on.
Every time I turned off the lights I was able to declare victory. After I felt they had learned their lesson I bought some Zigbee bulbs that actually work.
Not sure this belongs, but my most proud automation is an automatic water bowl for my dogs. It automatically drains, rinses, and fills 16 times per day so they always have fresh water. They deserve a better life than my lazy ass can give them.
:O it’s hooked to the tap and a drain I assume? How big is that?
Correct! It connects to a sink drain the same way a dishwasher does. It is actually a bathroom sink, the kind that sits on top of the counter. We have had three Great Danes at one time so trying to keep up with a clean water dish was really impossible. We no longer have large dogs but the desire to keep them in clean water persists.
What a clever idea! Is the dirty water drained from the bottom of the bowl or is it pumped out?
Pumped from the bottom. The basin sits on a raised box that holds the internals, including a pump for draining and a water valve for filling. Basically it uses a timer that commands the pump and a sump circuit for the fill valve detecting high, low, and overflow conditions.
The pump runs for three minutes every hour for sixteen hours between 0600 and 2200. The three minutes is enough to drain the entire thing with enough time for the clean fill water to rinse the basin and be drained away before stopping the pump and letting the fill top it off with clean water.
We have a ZzZ script which slowly turns off the TV and lights.
It works from one end of the house through the kitchen, then lounge, then up the stairs, the idea is it follows me to bed turning off things as I’m walking…
A separate script tells me that it’s time for bed (as I find finishing the day difficult).
Not as fancy but an hour before my bed time my small stained glass lamp turns on as a reminder I have an hour left. 5 minutes before bed my phone goes into night mode. At bed time all the lights in my room shut off. It’s been way more effective than my ADHD ass having no idea what time it is and staying up super late.
Not too crazy but I have automations based on whether external doors are open: if it’s hot and it’s cooler outside and someone opens the door then the fan near it gets turned out. Similarly if the heater is on but someone leaves a door open longer than one minute (conservative) the heaters will shut off. And all the air fresheners shut off if the doors are ever open.
Laziest eh? Probably the one that deletes completed items from my shopping list when I leave the supermarket, because I got sick of doing it manually.
Most ridiculous would be the NFC tag I have on the lid of my cold brew coffee jug. I make a batch so rarely that I can never remember how much coffee to add, so scanning the tag makes my Google Home say; “You want 80g of coffee per litre, or 6 scoops.”
That’s a good idea I’m gonna steal it. You should make a blueprint.
I made an automated sandwich maker. The automation turns it on, sets a timer, shows the timer on tv, turns it off when the timer goes off, pauses the tv and turns lights in kitchen on, if after sunset. Ridiculous? Jup. But also super cool.
My dishwasher automatically selects it’s Eco program when powered on. The Eco program uses more water and more energy than the Auto program while also taking almost twice as long. So I have an automation that triggers when my dishwasher is powered on and then selects the Auto program for me - because pressing a button to change the program after loading the dishwasher would be too much to ask.
If it uses more water and more energy, what exactly is “eco” about it?
@pfr @homeassistant just remember that this machine needs to clean it’s pipes too, just using chemicals for that won’t do very well i guess. I’m not saying that this is logical (making this eco mode) but using more electricity for hot water and using more water (for not reusing too much water all over again) is probably the sweet spot for lasting much longer. Which in turn is not in the interest of the company selling these machines. I guess.
alias la=“ls -la”
Turn the lights on and off in the basement. The kids kept playing with the lights and arguing over it, so I automated the whole floor and blocked the switches off.
Arguments immediately stopped.
Does meal prep count because I don’t really like cooking?
I replaced my fridge light with an RGB zwave light and door sensor. This concept has been solved for decades and my solution is worse. But it also turns green…
Easily the most ridiculous is the one I made on a motion trigger from the camera pointed out my window to take a snapshot, pass it to ollama/qwen3, and have it compose a haiku about the scene to be read aloud by Pocket TTS.
I’ve got a led strip on my toilet door. It turns red when someone is inside (mesured by the wasp in a box principle.
I’m unfamiliar with the wasp in a box principle. Is that the one where you keep a box of live wasps in the bathroom and determine if someone is in there based on how recently you’ve heard a scream?
Here’s the problem, I keep a jar of poisonous gas triggered by a randomly decaying radioactive atom in my bathroom, so all of my wasps are in superposition.
Where do you guys find power outlets for all these weird placements of LED strips? :D Outlets in my house is not in great places for something like this.
I lucked out and was simply in a relationship with a gal whom I helped purchase a house with a handy switched power outlet near the ceiling which was likely intended for seasonal decorative lights.
I co-oped the outlet once we got married but I need to replace the piece of tape that keeps the light in with one of these multi-button zigbee mains-powered switches that fit in multi-gang decora plates. I refuse to do wifi unless I can run esphome on it, and I will only trust matter when it runs over thread.I know there are some zwave rechargeable LED strips but they’re pricey
