homeassistant

Scripts are used for a lot of things! Generally any time I want to do the same thing under multiple automations, I use a script as the middleman.

For example, I built a script for turning off all of my lights each night but it has to be fed a time scaling variable to determine specifically how quickly to turn them off (sometimes I want them turned off quickly vs slowly). Automations trigger said script with the right scale factor.

I have air purifiers that I ramp up and down conditionally, they don't have a built in ramping function so I built a script to ramp them to a target % in their allowed 10% increments, over a variable time period. This can be then be called in one line from any automation or script.

When I'm turning off lights each night, I want them to ramp down to a specific level/color/temperature before turning off but only if they are currently on. Rather than build an if statement for every light, a script takes a input list of lights and runs through each one to determine whether or not to ramp.

Finally, my Google Home device is able to call scripts directly, ("hey Google, activate Cozy Time" triggers the "Cozy Time" script) so some things I use Google Assistant to trigger use scripts directly since that was at least easier at the time than using an automation. If I automate the same thing (e.g., a "Cozy Time" button above), I can just call the script from the automation in one line, easy peasy.