I love playing with my HA and associated devices. I suspect that most of you reading this get a bit of a jolt every time you add and incorporate a new sensor, camera, integration and get to play with it.
I have all the door/window sensors and locks/covers, every angle of my exterior covered with cameras, alarm, network devices, appliances, sprinklers, household devices covered.
Any ideas for a new thing I can play with?
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Just discovering this after two months. This thread has given me some great ideas and is sure to keep me busy with my HA setup for a while. Thank you everyone 🙂
One of my favorite automations is my “temperature lamp.” HA takes an average temperature, humidity, and illuminance from various outdoor sensors around my property. I have a template sensor that uses these values, then gives me a “feels-like” outdoor temperature. Another template sensor takes this “feels-like” temperature and converts it to a percentage between 0 (freezing) an 100 (> 120 degrees F). It uses this percentage to calculate a value between blue and red on a perceptually-uniform colorspace (CIELAB) and spits out an RGB value. An automation watches this RGB value and applies it to a RGB light bulb in my living room.
The result is that I have a light that displays what the temperature “feels like” and changes color in a way that people perceive as matching the temperature. So if the lamp looks “kind of blue” it’s going to feel “kind of cold” outside. If the bulb looks “kind of red,” it’s going to feel “kind of warm.”
I set this up for fun, but it’s actually ended up being really useful. Before we leave the house, we can just glance over at the lamp and know if we need to put on a sweatshirt or a coat, or maybe leave the outerwear at home.
lol - that won’t work for me, I live in Texas and that means my light would always be deep, dark red. Cool concept though.
Hook up your bathroom fan to a humidity sensor
Automate any window blinds
Christmas leds on exterior. Dig-quad with WLED software.
NFC tags are cheap and fun
Actually NFC tags were one of my first things back when I was using HomeKit. They are much better in HA because you can fire an event without any interaction with the device that scans it and that is pretty cool.
Thanks, I have a 10-pack of tags that I could deploy to do random stuff for my own enjoyment. I appreciate the reminder!
The only downside is that the smartphone needs to be unlocked 🙁
Not if you build an NFC tag reader! Then anyone can scan tags! Great for music jukeboxes!
Do you mean that smartphones can act as a NFC tag? Even when they’re locked?
Oh sorry, I meant that with an nfc tag reader you don’t need the smart phone. Apologies that I wasn’t clear.
Oh, nooouuuu! I was so happy when I read your post! 😆 Thanks for clarifying.
Can I recommend taking a look at espHome? Getting started might be a little expensive depending on what you’ve got, but you can build pretty much anything for pretty cheap.
As I replied to another who suggested ESPHome - I don’t want a bunch boards and wires stuck everywhere and unless I am misunderstanding it I’ll need to get into 3d printing to make enclosures for stuff. I can see going there some day but no room for a makerspace in this house until the boy moves out.
I’ve been an electronics hobbyist for years, and I still don’t own a 3D printer. You can buy premade enclosures in almost every size you can imagine. Then just drill holes to mount IO ports.
I do want to get a 3D printer exactly for this reason, but I’ve just never gotten around to buying one. They are certainly not a necessity if you want to build your own stuff.
I started to play around with WLED and integrated a whole mess of LED lights to HA. I’d also recommend ESPHome so you can build your own devices. Voice control, water flow rate sensors, etc.
Yes, LEDs and water flow and voice control among other goodies.
I keep hearing ESPHome but it seems so bare metal - how do you make the little boards look like they belong? I really don’t want to have to start 3d printing stuff to make enclosures.
Have you got any air quality sensors? Particulates, CO2, VOCs, CO, Radon, there’s a while bunch of sensors, and a variety of DIY projects to put them together.
It also has the practical benefit of maybe improving your health.
Do you have a suggestion for a good air quality sensor (especially for CO2 and VOCs) that outputs reliable results, works over ZigBee and is preferably battery powered? I had a CO2 sensor once but that needed to be calibrated outside really frequently so I stopped using it.
If you want a whole kit then the AirGradient ones look pretty nice
Thanks for the recommendation. That is pretty pricey but if it works, that’s fine. Though probably not feasible to have in every room then :D
But I assume it also needs periodic recalibration for the CO2 sensor, right?
The CO2 sensor calibration thing is inherent in the technology. They drift, a lot, and without occasional reference to a known standard, there’s no way to know whether “1000” is really 1000, or 500, or 2000, but exactly how that gets implemented seems to vary a lot. I have an SCD30 board from Adafruit, which internally records CO2 minima and, over the course of week or so, adjusts its calibration so that minimum is 420. That means no special calibration procedure, but it does have to be somewhere that it gets periodic fresh air exposure.
There’s a newer, photoacoustic sensor technology that doesn’t seem to require continuous recalibration, but (at least this one: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/22956 ) require an extensive initial calibration.
Sorry for the late reply. That photacoustic one looks interesting. I have no issue with an extensive initial calibration when it then just works without me needing to take care of it regularly. Thank you :)
