Asklemmy

43908 readers

1314 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

141

Home automation - why? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

108 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I am failing to see the interest in having tons of IOT devices to manage, connect, segment, etc… Why would someone want to do it? To be clear, I have friends deep in it but… I still don’t understand. Can anyone try to explain the magic I am failing to see?

Edit: Thank you all for sharing your experiences! The ones I found more interesting are those that can easily translate in reducing or tracking consumption. The rest I hear but makes more sense when I look at it from an hobbyist perspective.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

How do you do the "both away or home"?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

If they're using Home Assistant then it's pretty straightforward. You can either have the devices report back their location and update based on a Geofence or you can check and see if everyone's on the wifi or not

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Since we're an iPhone family I use iCloud3 in HomeAssistant to track our devices. After setting that up and associating the phones with people in HA it was just a matter of creating triggers based on us entering the home zone:

alias: Somebody Arrives Home
trigger:
  - platform: zone
    entity_id: person.jack
    zone: zone.home
    event: enter
  - platform: zone
    entity_id: person.jill
    zone: zone.home
    event: enter

We live at the end of a dead-end, so I set up the home zone to extend down the road a bit. That gives iCloud3 enough time to figure out we're home and trigger the automation in HA while we're still approaching. I combine the above with a check to see if it's roughly sunset to sunrise, and if it is then turn on the outdoor lights.

For doing things like turning off the lights when nobody is home, I have a similar trigger for everybody leaving the home zone, followed by a conditional that verifies everybody is away:

condition:
  - condition: or
    conditions:
      - condition: template
        value_template: >-
          {{ states('person.jack') != 'home' and states('person.jill') !=  'home'  }}