What are some clever/creative/geeky ways the HN crowd controls their lights (or other smart things)?
Eventually the mod I used to expose the game events over a websocket stopped working, and the creator stopped maintaining it. I maintained a private fork of it myself for a while, but eventually got tired of spending so much time keeping it working after each game update just for the sake of a party trick.
Also my smart robot vacuum is only allowed to start vacuuming when my phone is outside a geofence around my home, and must stop vacuuming if I re-enter the geofence. I never see it vacuuming, but my floors are always clean!
When a machine door opens, I can tell who did it (everyone always has their phone or watch on and is seen by ESPresence. Once the door is closed, the power monitoring kicks in, and when the cycle is 100% done, the AirPod Minis in the house all chime. If the door isn’t opened in ten minutes, a notification is sent to the originally detected person’s phone.
If the door hasn’t opened in 30 minutes, mom and dad get a notification ;)
Ultimately that was more of a fun concept than useful.
This is not as creative but is more useful: well-placed motion sensors with rules in Home Assistant to trigger lights to the dimmest possible setting at certain hours, for a late night stumble.
Even less creative but even more useful: plain old timers set up in HA that are synced with the sunset to slowly fade the lights in, and a bedtime to turn them back off.
In my bathroom I have a fan that stays on for 1/2 hour in the morning. I set my razor in front of it so it dries every morning. Supposedly the blade will last much longer. I kinda think so but don't have a really definite data set yet.
I also have them for the lights and bubbler on my aquarium (I think the bubbler should be off at night for 6 hours or so. Let's the fish sleep).