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.
Sunset and sunrise automations. Lights on and off, vacuum run times - all adapted to presence.
Made the litter-robot auto-repair when it enters trouble states. Better history of all elements controlled.
I use a lot of sunset/sunrise automations, but one of my favorite is for the lights on the main floor of the house. They turn on with a motion/presence sensor when someone enters the room, but the intensity of the light and the color of the light are controlled by the sunrise/sunset times. During the day, they turn on at 100% brightness and a cool white; starting 1 hour before sunset and 1 hour before sunrise, they scale between 100%/cool white and 60%/warm white. You don’t notice it unless you’re really paying attention, but it really helps the house feel a lot more “cozy.”
I’m almost embarrassed to admit, I found an online image of the colors of the sky through the day, pasted it into excel, and then capture 160+ rgb values for the sunset. It was a tedious process, but no math got it right.
I set all those values (and a warmer and cooler set) in the script and then pass in the desired duration. Most nights we have a 45 minute sunset play out across 6 total lights. Three sets of values, so the bulbs don’t match.
Starts as soft white ending in the darkest twilight blue my bulbs can provide. We remark on it regularly and I think it’s helped ease us into the right frame of mind for sleep.
I run the same values in reverse for sunrise.
Clearly, its my favorite one.