Comment by madaxe_again | Hacker News Reader

Comment by madaxe_again | Hacker News Reader

I did similar with our coffee machine a year ago - I was bored of getting home from the school run to a cold pot of coffee because the machine automatically turns off the hot plate after 30 minutes, and it seems there is no such thing as a WiFi connected drip coffee machine. Kettles, yes, coffee machines, no.

Dead simple. Cracked it open, chucked an ESP32 in there connected to the soft power button, and to the “machine is on” indicator on the display, which was conveniently on its own pin. No need for any thermal protection cleverness as the machine does that itself.

Now I just turn it back on when I’m heading home, and no longer have to wait for the pot to warm up again.

I then decided to stop using the “make coffee at time” functionality baked into the machine, as the kid gets up when the kid gets up, and the machine would either start early and wake her, or she’d get up before it and I’d have to go start it. Now, she opens her bedroom door, I get “kid is awake” alert on my phone, and the machine brews the coffee.

> Now, she opens her bedroom door, I get “kid is awake” alert on my phone, and the machine brews the coffee.

Out of all of the smart home threads and articles I've read over the years this is the only sentence that made me wish I had it. It's genius

Until the kid uses the bathroom in the middle of the night and goes back to bed. Though the GP seems to not mind stale coffee so perhaps he won't care.

Exceptions like the above make automations hard.

DR stands for "didn't realize"; the first time it happens you just run back to the drawing board and add some safety boundaries on it.

So... just make sure the automation only becomes available from ~6 AM to 8 AM. ;)

Sure, but in home automation there was a whole lot of those didn't realize situations that you won't get right. In the one end I often go for the question, 'is it really worth the bother of trying to set this all up'?

In most cases, there's nothing wrong with the switch on the wall. I don't need a complex home automation. I do have Home Assistant. It isn't very useful. It's kind of nice to have a couple of lights on from dark until 9 p.m. but with the efficiency of modern LEDs, it's probably cheaper to just leave those lights on 24-7 than to leave my home assistant machine on 24-7.

I gate it exactly as the parent says - automation only runs between 0530 and 0800, and when we’re home.

I literally couldn’t do without HA - I live off-grid, and it manages everything from monitoring water tank levels & running pumps to a power grid distributed over three independent and geographically distributed battery banks. Monitors for anomalies and tells me what is acting up - for instance today I got sent on a mission to find out why an array of PV was underproducing by 33%. Wouldn’t have noticed until it started having energy budget impacts otherwise. Makes decisions on whether today is a passive cooling/heating day or whether we have the energy budget to run climate control, when windows should be opened/closed to maximise efficiency, which blinds to close when depending on where the sun is to prevent or encourage passive solar gain, when to run the partially pumped storage hydro and in which direction, when to pull the pin on the deluge system and where if it’s set to wildfire mode. It has literally saved the house - not our lives, as we’d already evac’d and left it in charge of firefighting.

Stuff like the coffee machine and opening the blinds in the morning are just easy quality of life improvements, something less to have to manage manually, as my days are full enough that removing any point of friction is useful.

And yeah, I’ll take slightly stale coffee now over fresh coffee in ten minutes.

It seems pretty easy to throw in an earliest time to trigger it

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