Home Automation
IKEA has a fun little LED lamp called UPPLYST which is shaped like a cloud. I’ve been using this lamp in the background of my video meetings from the home office for quite some time, but recently decided to have some more fun with it.
I recently bought a Google Nest Hub 2nd gen and wanted to use it as a dashboard device for Home Assistant (HA). Now. the Google Nest Hub is not really meant used like this, as there is no real way of installing 3rd party apps on it, such as the Home Assistant app. Thankfully there are ways to get it to display Lovelace Dashboards from HA, and here is how I solved it with local network access only.
Sonos Beam is my main driver for television audio, which is great, but the sound travels between the floors in my house so I want Night Mode to be enabled late at night. I also do not want to manually have to tweak the night mode settings, and figured that doing it on a schedule, from within Home Assistant was the way to go.
I need my caffeine fix. It also needs to be very readily available when I wake up. Before home automation, I used to load my Moccamaster KBGT741 Thermal Coffee Maker with water and ground coffee before bedtime so all I had to do was to hit the power button to get caffeine flowing. But why not schedule it to before I get up so that there is always fresh coffee available the instant I get up in the morning? Add an IKEA Trådfri Smart Outlet, and I can schedule my fix! Since the coffee maker brews into a insulated carafe, it doesn’t get burned if, I sleep in, while at the same time keeping it hot. That’s a win-win! I know, this method doesn’t provide the absolute best coffee experience, but as far as I’m concerned availability beats quality in the wee hours of the morning.
In my hallway there are a few Phillips Hue White and Color Ambiance Bulbs that I’ve had some fun with the last couple of years. Originally automated through IFTTT, they change color if one of my favorite football teams play a match. This has been working well for quite some time, but with IFTTT recently starting to limit the amount of Applets you can create, and the fact that they only run every 15 minutes, I decided to try and emulate the functionality I used with Home Assistant and Node-RED instead.
I’ve been running Home Asssistant (HA) in my network for well over a year now, and it’s primary use case has been connecting devices from different ecosystems into one management interface. Lately I have been migrating a few automations from native HA to Node-RED, which has been a fun exercise, and I’m looking to expand the usage of automations in the time to come.
My mantra for this setup is that everything that can be automated, should be automated, while at the same time keeping it as simple and unobtrusive as possible for everyone in the household.