Asklemmy

43851 readers

808 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]

144

Home automation - why? (lemmy.ml)

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

110 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] 1 points 9 months ago

I came up with these myself over time, they started 10+ years ago using a Mac platform called Indigo, but since moving into our new house a year ago I've switched over to Home Assistant as well. I have a background that includes 10 years of software development & another 15 of IT, so these sorts of things come fairly easily to me when I think about it a bit.

My wife and I use iPhones and I found iCloud3, which is a great add-on that tracks locations based on those devices. I started out with the washer/dryer notification with the simple realization that we regularly forgot about laundry in our washer in the basement since we'd forget that we had started a load. So I figured out how to have HA send us alerts when the washer or dryer finished. But I quickly realized that wasn't all that useful if one or both of us was at work, shopping, etc. I then realized I could set up a trigger based on a time schedule that checks if we're home or not, and only sends the alert if we are. So I have a HA automation that is triggered every 10 minutes by a timer, but the timer is disabled by default. That automation uses iCloud3 to check if either of us are home. If we are then the automation calls a script to notify us. If we're not home then the automation resets the timer for 10 minutes. When the washer completes it triggers an automation that just starts that timer running. That gives us a little time to park the car, bring in any groceries, etc. before being reminded that we have laundry waiting.