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?
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.
If the boy has a gaming rig, then he also has a CAD workstation.
I managed to get a dodgy copy of AutoCAD 2 running on my 80286 with an 80287 maths co pro that I persuaded my parents to buy me for Chrimbo. Sadly, it was a bit shite. The next version of AutoCAD needed a 32 bit machine with 32 MB (yes MB) of RAM. That was way out of my league.
Depending on the age of the boy and given how long the little darlings are tending to hang around these days, a constructive bribery system in lieu of rent or pocket money enhancement might be in order 8)
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.
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!
Not if you build an NFC tag reader! Then anyone can scan tags! Great for music jukeboxes!
You don’t need to unlock your phone to fire an event in HomeAssistant. My iPhone needs to be awake but will still scan and run shortcut while locked.
Ooh, Ive heard of these. Can you name some of the ways you use them? Do these effectively work as a cheap alternative to a physical switch or can they be used more creatively?
Yeah it’s essentially a trigger. I have a few purposes. One is for my dumb washing machine plugged into an energy monitoring smart plug. After it registers the washing is done, I’ll get alerts through the house in intervals until I get up and scan the NFC tag on the washing machine (I forget to hang out washing.
As I’m in a rental and I can’t have smart switches so I have smart globes and put tags on the switches to toggle the lights.
One by my bedside table to turn off all the lights and smart plugs.
One on my front door to set my away from home scene.
I also have a signed band poster hung on the wall with one, which opens the album in Spotify.
Good fun.
ESP-32 based voice controller, with LLM support: https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/s3_box_voice_assistant/
Do you use Plex at all? One fun integration is to turn the lights off automatically when something starts to play, then turn them back on when paused/stopped. It’s fun to see the lights auto-dim as media starts to play.
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.
My CO2 sensor has dramatically changed my routines. My space isn’t small - maybe 1200 square feet/100 sq m - but it must be pretty well sealed, because I can easily see my own breathing add to CO2. Nevermind cooking on the gas stove. Treadmill time adds 500+ ppm.
Now, I open windows every chance I get (which isn’t super often, because the dewpoint is 70 oF/20 oC in Atlanta), and I’ve shifted a lot of my cooking to an electric tea kettle, hot plate, and toaster oven.
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.
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.
