Looking for a DIY home automation system for an elderly parent to use as an SOS button / Fall alarm. Currently don't have any smart home devices so would be starting from scratch. Was looking for something relatively inexpensive and straightforward. Doesn't need to be instant notification and a couple of seconds delay shouldn't be a problem. Stubborn parent doesn't want an alarm so something inconspicuous that I can say I just threw together. Thinking wifi button linked to an app or a cheap zigbee button and hub setup linked to automation. Any suggestions welcome.

Having some fun connecting my setup for my home automation. having fun with crestron stuff (AP4, VC-4, TSW-1070 with lightbar and TS-1070, coolautomation, tekmar (not shown here) and ubiquiti extensives gear.

This photo misses the enclosure door where there will be few status 24v lights, switchs and a touchscreen embeded PC...

Just wanted to share it with people who might actually appreciate it, because my wife couldn't give less of a shit about this 🤣

Doing the whole house isn’t exactly cheap, especially with Lutron, so I’m thinking SmartWings may be enough for what I need. I’m especially interested in whether anyone installed smart blinds and later regretted it.

I’ve also seen a few oldposts saying they can lower heating or cooling costs. Did you actually notice any difference? Thanks in advance!

Who might have a lead?

I have an eufy door sensor, a Dyson purifier, and a Rachio 3 irrigation controller connected to my home automation hub. The hub shows the basics, but I still have to open the three vendor apps for some battery, filter, and controller details. I was tired of checking them every evening.

I set up Airtap to open those apps on a cloud Android phone. Each night, the summary showed up in an iMessage thread on my iPhone. It was only supposed to read the status screens. On night nine, that thread asked me to approve a tap that would have started every watering zone.

Rachio had added a seasonal notice above the device list. The routine closed it, landed on the Quick Run screen, and mistook the large green button for an online status indicator. When it could not find the usual status label, it tried to verify the device another way. I rejected the request and checked the task history.

I had written "read only" in the prompt and assumed that was enough. It wasn't. The task still had permission to tap almost anything, and the approval rule was the only thing that stopped it. I limited it to known navigation steps, blocked device controls, and moved Rachio into a separate weekly check.

Over the next 12 days, it caught one low sensor battery. It also missed a Dyson filter warning when the app loaded a blank card. A second run found it, but I counted the first attempt as a miss.

It saves me from opening three apps every evening. Now I only open a vendor app when something changes or the report comes back incomplete. It is not more accurate than checking on my own phone, and the missed Dyson warning proved that. The useful part is the scheduled first pass, not better device data. I now treat it as a backup summary, keep the native alerts on, and give the routine no access to device controls.

I currently have these remotes (mtrf-rem-15nl) and I hate them, one has stopped controlling the blinds all together despite having power. Has anyone found a successful generic replacement? They want $100 where I am and I'd rather not pay that much.

Picked up on a mailbox motion sensor post from a while back and finally did my own version. Ran a Zigbee contact sensor on the mailbox door instead of motion and wired it into Home Assistant. Now I get a phone notification the second the mail carrier opens it. Sounds trivial, but I work from home full time and was genuinely walking out to check an empty mailbox like three times a week. That part is fixed now.

What I didn't plan for was how useful it became for package theft awareness. Not a full camera solution, just a heads up that something happened at the mailbox so I can glance at the front door cam right then instead of hours later. The timing matters more than I expected.

Battery life on the contact sensor has been fine. About four months in and still sitting above 60 percent. The tricky part was weatherproofing the sensor itself because the mailbox gets direct afternoon sun here in Austin and the internal temps were reading way high until I added a small foam buffer inside the lid.

Curious what others have done for mailbox or frontofhouse presence detection that isn't a full camera setup. There seem to be a few different approaches floating around and I haven't seen a solid comparison of how they hold up long term.

I built a Siri + Home Assistant shortcut to make finding shows on Apple TV way easier
I’ve been using Apple TV for years and have tried a bunch of different shortcuts and little tricks to make the experience better. Recently I built one using Siri and Home Assistant that I thought was pretty useful.
I can tell Siri “Watch [show]”, and it figures out which streaming service the show is available on in my region, sends that information through Home Assistant, then opens the right streaming app and searches for the show automatically.
I put together a video showing how the shortcut works, along with some of the other Apple TV shortcuts and things I’ve picked up over the years.

Here is the full video: Full video

Has anyone else built any Apple TV shortcuts or automations like this?

Can anyone recommend a UK plug that has motion and temperature sensors built in, zwave, zigbee, wifi, matter, thread etc doesn't bother me which one

Hey everyone,

For anyone discovering it for the first time, HA-NILM is a local Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring system for Home Assistant. It uses your whole-home power data and a short training process to estimate when individual appliances are running and how much energy they use.

I’ve just released HA NILM 1.1.9, with support for multiple mains sensors.

What’s new

Multiple mains sensors

You can now configure multiple mains power sensors, making HA-NILM suitable for split phase, three phase, multiple meters, and independently monitored panel setups.

Each appliance model can be assigned to the mains sensor that actually powers it, and inference is performed using that specific feed.

All Mains view

You can view each mains individually or combine them into a single All Mains view.

Mains aware training

When training an appliance, you select which mains sensor it belongs to. That association is stored with the model and used automatically for previews and live inference.

Backward compatible

Existing single mains installations are migrated automatically, with no retraining required.

GitHub: https://github.com/lgarciamarrero92/ha-nilm

Feedback, bug reports, and strange edge cases are always welcome. Create issues here: https://github.com/lgarciamarrero92/ha-nilm/issues

Share your successes

Share your story.

Getting everything configured, updated, and wired up on the desk first to make the actual install go smoothly. Gotta love a clean pre-configuration bench test!

Anyone else prefer setting things up in the office rather than troubleshooting live on site?

I would love to have motorized windows, but it isn't realistic. I did realize though that I could notify my phone when it's time to open / close the windows and then trigger the manual motors (my arms).

Above, you can see how I'm using it during the summer. As the outdoor temps rise in the morning, I trigger a notification to close the windows on my phone. And in the evening, I get another notification to close them. I also have an attic fan that can exchange a lot of the air in my home, so I run that sometimes too after opening up the windows in the evening. I wish I had some way to know how much this is saving me in A/C costs, but I imagine it's not nothing.

I use appdaemon python scripts for all of this in home assistant, so thre scripts are probably not useful for others directly, but I'm sure you could do a lot of this with yaml as well.

I'm currently using an airgradient outdoor air quality monitor outdoors and the thermostats for data indoors. That also gives me local AQI, so on those rare days where there's a wildfire or something, the windows stay closed.

I also compute outdoor dewpoint as a calculation from temp and humidity and keep the windows closed above around 65F dewpoint. If originally just assumed humidity would be sufficient, but when it gets cold, you get higher relative humidity since the air can't hold as much water. As the air warms up inside the house, the same amount of water becomes lower relative humidity. So, dewpoint is more stable and works much better.

Originally, I just used weather apis for this, but I get slightly better local resolution using a personal weather monitor.

I had a few friends I told about this want to do something similar, but they aren't the gadget'y type. The simple version of this didn't actually require anything more than weather api data - no sensors, so I rebuilt this a free website version that I could share with folks. https://porchweather.com/ Software is my day job for the last 20 years, and this kind of side project is fun to set up.

If anyone is interested in the appdaemon code, let me know and I'll put it up on github somewhere public after cleaning it up a little bit.

Initially I get everything working, this takes about 24 hrs of head scratching, looking up various trouble shooting routines, but eventually everthing works.

About a year or 18 months later, for absolutly no apparent reason some item just quits.

I have by now forgotten all the various hoops I jumped through to get things working originally so onother round of unplugging, resetting and trouble shooting follows. Eventually I do something that makes it all work again. I have no idea what I did so I just sit back and hope that it keeps working for another year or so.

My AquaLogic wireless remote died, and I didn’t want to spend hundreds replacing obsolete hardware. Instead, I connected an ESP8266 to the controller’s RS-485 bus and built a local webpage for it.

It’s running on an AquaLogic PS-4 rev 2.93. The firmware is currently listen-only and displays equipment status, pool and air temperatures, salt level, chlorinator output, diagnostics, and historical trends. It doesn’t require Home Assistant, MQTT, or a cloud service.

Control is deliberately disabled right now. The current interface isn’t electrically isolated, so I’m waiting for an isolated RS-485 board before testing transmission timing and key commands.

This is a personal project, and there’s nothing for sale. I’m trying to determine how many compatible systems are still operating. If you have an AquaLogic or ProLogic:

- What controller model and software revision do you have?

- Does your original remote or network interface still work?

- Would you be interested in testing a plug-in Wi-Fi interface once control is safely working?

​

Hey all, dealing with a bizarre localization bug on a Candy ProWash 500 smart top-loader connected via the hOn app. The app itself is set up properly in my local region and language, but the washing machine's physical LED panel keeps scrolling text in Hungarian (specifically "TÁVVEZÉRLÉS BE" when enabling remote control).

I tried forcing the manual language menu directly on the panel buttons, but none of the standard Candy shortcuts seem to work with this newer inverter control board. Has anyone experienced the hOn cloud pushing the wrong regional profile to the appliance firmware, and is there any way to force a locale sync through the app settings or a specific network reset?

This is the stained glass style verrière in one of the rooms at La Maison Fantastique, lit from behind. Alex and I built it ourselves, plexiglass panels shaped and painted to look like old leaded glass, with LED strips run along the inside of each frame instead of showing directly. Wiring it took a full evening at the workbench, soldering the strip leads and tinning the connections so each panel could link up electrically once mounted. It's tied into the same DMX lighting setup we use to control the rest of the house. Anyone else done backlit panels like this? Curious how you handled the wiring once you had several panels to link together.

Has anyone had success with connecting a Bond Bridge to a T-Mobile 5G gateway?

One thing I think is missing here is an always-visible category list near the top of the subreddit.

Not just post flairs, but an actual index of smart home categories that you can tap to browse that part of the ecosystem.

Something like:

Smart locks

Smart blinds

Smart lighting

Thermostats

Cameras

Doorbells

Garage doors

Sensors

Robot vacuums

Smart appliances

Home Assistant

HomeKit

Alexa

Google Home

Matter

Thread

The smart home category is huge now, and everything gets mixed together in the main feed.

A permanent category index would make it much easier to see what kinds of products exist, browse discussions by type, and discover options you may not even know are available.

Basically a simple smart home directory at the top of the subreddit.

/rant

This is for my Mom, she doesn't need motion sensing, an IR camera or video saving. She lives in an apartment and the hallway is always lighted. We can run a wire through the door frame to power it; I want to avoid the requirement of having to recharge. She has limited mobility, and just wants to be able to see and talk to whomever is at the door using her phone or Amazon Echo. I'd also like her to be able to have at least two chimes in the apartment.

I'm aware of devices like the Kill-A-Watt and many smart plugs, which will track energy usage of a device. I want to do something slightly different -- simply keep a record of when the device is drawing power. Specifically, I'd like to know when a sump pump is running, and for how long. I suppose I could measure how many amps it draws, and then infer hours from Kw/hrs. But I'd prefer a more direct measurement. It could be a plug-in device like a Kill-A-Watt, but it could also be hardwired into a circuit. HomeKit connectivity would be a bonus. Thanks in advance for any suggestions!