homeassistant

I made an automated sandwich maker. The automation turns it on, sets a timer, shows the timer on tv, turns it off when the timer goes off, pauses the tv and turns lights in kitchen on, if after sunset. Ridiculous? Jup. But also super cool.

I have 4 lights in my room that I use for different things. Ceiling light, light above my bed, lights hanging from the high part of the vaulted ceiling (these are yellow glass really pretty but kinda dim great for before bed) and a small stained glass lamp.

I have an automation to turn on the small stained glass lamp at 7 because that's when I should be getting ready to get in bed, wind down, read a book, something like that. At 825 my phone goes into sleep mode, night light and night mode activated. At 830 all the lights in my room turn off and my fan turns on.

At 330am my alarm goes off and the stained glass lamp turns on and the fan turns off. It's dim enough to not be blinding but bright enough I won't just turn my alarm off. At 340 the yellow lights come on to make sure my ass gets up. As I'm walking out of my room, I can double tap the light switch down and it will turn off all 4 lights and the fan if any of the above are on.

I also have a button hanging by a command strip on my night stand that can control everything for when I'm too lazy to open the app on my phone 😂

We have a ZzZ script which slowly turns off the TV and lights.

It works from one end of the house through the kitchen, then lounge, then up the stairs, the idea is it follows me to bed turning off things as I'm walking...

A separate script tells me that it's time for bed (as I find finishing the day difficult).

Got an Alexa as a gift. I use it to turn the living room light on and off. Basically a high tech Clapper.

I have an announcement play every 30 minutes to yell at me in a harsh voice "Drink Water God Damn It!" I forget to hydrate a lot. I've tried many other reminders, but none of them worked well. Turns out I just need someone to yell at me.

Laziest eh? Probably the one that deletes completed items from my shopping list when I leave the supermarket, because I got sick of doing it manually.

Most ridiculous would be the NFC tag I have on the lid of my cold brew coffee jug. I make a batch so rarely that I can never remember how much coffee to add, so scanning the tag makes my Google Home say; "You want 80g of coffee per litre, or 6 scoops."

Mostly the ones that send a post from one social media app to another.

@spaghettiwestern The two that made me dive into the home assistant rabbit hole:

1. When the rabbits are out around sunset (door sensor on their cage) lights turn red and my and my wife's phone get a notification. Too many times we remembered that the rabbits were loose while it was pitch black. Not too good with black rabbits...

2. Fixing the mess that is my Marantz receiver, communicating with my TV over hdmi and lately my wiim streamer. Turn it on and off depending on need, controlling zone 2 as well as turning on power for the zone 2 amplifier when it's used in the receiver. The ridiculous part here is that it's necessary - these things should just work!

I have alerts that push out when the fridge door is open.
And another that flashes all the lights in the house when the doorbell rings.

Not sure this belongs, but my most proud automation is an automatic water bowl for my dogs. It automatically drains, rinses, and fills 16 times per day so they always have fresh water. They deserve a better life than my lazy ass can give them.

"Good night" turns off all the lights in the house. I guess it's silly/lazy because at midnight all the lights turn off anyway.

Thought of another one...

I bought some TP-Link wifi bulbs that were flaky from the start. After some investigation I discovered that these particular bulbs felt it important to phone home to China every few seconds and became very, very unhappy if the lines were down. After a short tantrum they would reset their wifi connection before regaining consciousness. What that meant in my 3 bulb fixture was that when my “lights off” scene was triggered and my firewall was blocking their corporate masters, one or more of the bulbs was often in a stupor and would remain on indefinitely.

Did I just go spend $25 on some new, decent bulbs that actually worked? Nope - no way some stinking TP-Link bulbs were going to win! Instead I spent hours creating multiple redundant automations that checked for each possible failure state, kept polling the bulbs until their tantrum ended and they regained consciousness, and then turned off whatever bulbs were left on.

Every time I turned off the lights I was able to declare victory. After I felt they had learned their lesson I bought some Zigbee bulbs that actually work.

I've got a led strip on my toilet door. It turns red when someone is inside (mesured by the wasp in a box principle.

44 automations + 27 scripts and counting, not sure any of them are totally over the top but theres at least 2 dedicated buttons in my house for when the dog needs to take a shit in the middle of the night to turn on specific lights for a short time for him.

Unfortunately I haven't taught him to use them on his own.

I click a button when taking my pill so I don't take it twice by mistake, it also alerts me if I've forgotten my dose. Not really ridiculous, but I wanted to feel included lol

I replaced my fridge light with an RGB zwave light and door sensor. This concept has been solved for decades and my solution is worse. But it also turns green...

Easily the most ridiculous is the one I made on a motion trigger from the camera pointed out my window to take a snapshot, pass it to ollama/qwen3, and have it compose a haiku about the scene to be read aloud by Pocket TTS.