I’m gonna assume you’re not using Home Assistant yet.

There is an app for Home Assistant but from your comment I’m assuming you’re talking about something like Smart Life.

Home Assistant takes all these different companies and creates a central hub for them all. So we have Hue bulbs and Nest cameras all talking to each other via Home Assistant.

If you’re already using Home Assistant then disregard and have look into PIR and Mm Wave sensor.

I’ve moved up a level and recently made a bed sensor.

I’ve had the opposite experience with the cube, but I use Zigbee2MQTT so I’m maybe that made the difference.

It’s a fantastic concept and I think everyone should buy one just because it’s so cool and so fucking useless at the same time.

So you have turn like a knob function, then changing sides, a knock knock, a slide and a drop sensor.

I programmed the drop sensor to toggle my room lights then showed a bunch of 40+ year old kids, who had great fun for a full 5 minutes playing epileptic catch.

The problem is that it has all these functions, but you only know what they are because you spent the time programming them. So it’s fucking useless to anyone else, and by the time you’ve set the thing down you’ve forgotten what you set it to do yourself.

I’ve had the turn like a knob set to brighten and dim my lights, then decided it should control the volume on the speaker when it’s playing music too, which lead to a little project in node red. But nobody else in the house even knows that’s what it does.

I should stop this wall of text, get one, it’s useless!

I tested both out years ago when I was first starting with ZigBee and preferred Z2MQTT, it was just way better. I’ve been using it ever since.

Nice! I’ve just set up a couple of daily tasks, and worked out how to get nagged to complete tasks in node red, which basically requires removing the tasks from the to-do. If it’s been ticked then the node errors out, but if it has not then it gets removed, the node completes and I can send a notification saying “You didn’t do X!”

Timers to add tasks sounds like a good next step, I’ll have to look into it

Yeah problem is that your body clock gets synched and you end up waking up early. It’s 7.30 on Xmas eve and I’m up again, although I hear footsteps so it looks like I have company this morning.

Yeah I used to be a Google Keep user. I still am but I used to be too.

Like I say I’ve synchronised Keep with HA now, just my shopping list using a HACs plugin. The only downside was that it required me to use a Docker container to get the Token which was doable but required me to learn how to get Docker running in Interactive Mode in Portainer which I’ve never done before.

If you’re interested there’s a dude on YouTube called FutreProofHomes that’s integrated ChatGPT with ToDo and is doing some cool things with it

Now then, that’s an impressive Lovelace view.

Haha no not anymore but I certainly used to. Now they’re entering teenage years and I have to drag them out of their beds.

It gets better

ESP32 and a pressure strip. Basically this https://github.com/eoncire/HA_bed_presence

I got a cheap Nest E thermostat on eBay from a charity shop seller. It cost me like £15.

Replaced my dumb one with it, then hooked it into HA and made a sensor from all my motion sensors and door sensors which all have temperature gauges in them.

Conglomerated those sensors into one that tracks the average (making sure to only have so many per floor so as not to skew the data to one part of the house) then made a sensor called “Is it cold enough to have the Heating on?” which acts as a simple switch with a lower and upper limit.

Now my heating only comes on when I need it to based off the temperature of the whole house instead of that one place the dumb thermostat was based.

The display unit for it died after less than a year, replaced that for another £20 on eBay and synced the new unit to the Thermostat on the wall.

So for less than £50 and some smarts I’ve upgraded my heating, and saved money on the bills (since it only comes on when we need it to rather than based on the temperature of one location).

I’m not particularly recommending Nest since I have no experience with other manufacturers, but I managed to do it all on the cheap and I’m quite pleased with the results

I think you should have a thin sheet of steel kept in your car or somewhere safe, so you can just use that like a locksmith.

I’m running Proxmox on a mini PC. I have a Debian VM for streaming and a Home Assistant VM.

Runs like a dream

In a community without a lot of content, complaining about added content is a bit rich, but some people are just dicks, it’s a fact of life.

Scroll on with your day

I bought an E off eBay from a charity shop and mine did the same thing. The WiFi chip burns out over time and they dgaf.

My solution was to just buy another satellite or whatever you wanna call it second hand off eBay. Gambled that the WiFi chip still worked and yeah, paired it and going again

It does. I use Mosquito but I believe HA has a built in one too. Mosquito was easy enough to set up though.

Honestly MQTT is like the nervous system of my HA setup. I started using it with Tasmota when I Tasmotised all my cheap WiFi bulbs, then opted for Zigbee2mqtt for my ZigBee setup.

But I also have things like my bedside clock (an old phone running WallPanel), my doorway tablet (a Nexus 7 running Fully Kiosk Browser), my PC and even my alarm clock app on my phone, all running through MQTT.

I even had Tasker on my phone communicating with HA via MQTT before I gave up on that. It’s really useful

Just set up MQTT in home Assistant, why not?

You can also use the GPS tracking in the companion app. If you’re on android (I’ve had issues on IOS) and have your home zone set up rightz it’s pretty damn solid.

I use it and have my outside lights integrated, and they’re always on when I get home at night

Go to your phone WiFi settings and turn off the random Mac address security feature on your wifi, then set up your router in HA as an integration. This will make device trackers for each mac address on your lan.

Then you can set that device tracker in your person.entity to track yourself.

That way, when you get home and on your WiFi, your router will mark you home

Hey Google play Devildriver on Spotify

I can’t do that, I’m an LLM and totally shit at it, you can try YouTube

If I wanted to try YouTube I’d have asked for YouTube you cunt