I’ve been running HA for a while, and it’s been working well; I haven’t had to change much in a few months. That being said, it’s fun to tinker with it, and I’m curious to hear what kind of automations the rest of the community is using. What automations are you most proud of? What are your favorite? What kind of interesting automations have you written?
My personal favorite is an automation that displays the current “apparent” temperature on a Hue bulb. It takes an average of the temperature, humidity, and luminance around my property and uses the average to compute an “apparent” (feels like) temperature. Then it applies a cosine function to the apparent temperature (to approximate how people feel temperature change), uses the resulting value to calculate a level between blue and red in CIELAB (a perceptually uniform color space), converts the results to RGB, and sets the color value of the hue bulb. The result is a bulb that changes color so that the change in color (as perceived by the eye) mirrors how the temperature “feels” outside. Ultimately what that means is that we can look at a small lamp with the hue bulb and say “It feels cold outside; we should put on a coat.” It’s probably overkill, but it was a fun programming exercise. We’ve started saying things like “It’s really blue today, I don’t feel like going out.”
I’d really enjoy reading what kind of interesting automations everyone else has written.
Less of an automation and more of a scene control, but I have all my light switches set up so that double tapping them up or down turns on or off all the lights on that floor of the house. It’s simple but we use it all the time.
I have an extension on this, in that a triple tap on the switch by the doors, will also lock the doors after 60 seconds.
Ah nice. I just have the switches by the front and garage doors turn off everything instead of just downstairs, so we can hit them on the way out the door. I think triple taps are reserved for inclusion/exclusion mode on my switches, sadly. The delayed lock is a good idea though, might just have to add that.
If I unlock my door, it will re-lock in 15 minutes as long as the door is shut. opening the door resets the timer.
Of course it’s a code door, so re-opening it has a very low chance of locking me out :)