True Smart home

Most of my modes are smart dynamic, day starts when i get up, night starts when i go to bed (voice commands). I have and evinign mode which is still time based and sometimes we just not ready for it to start.

How is the comunity people making the house truly smart and automate the house based on your movments/behavours?

I use illuminance to control some of my modes.
External hue motion sensors have a ‘lux’ sensor also.
I use these in combination with a weather station (not required) to get an ‘average’ lux value
After some trial an error to get the correct trigger value, I change to my evening mode using this in combination with a ‘30 mins before sunset’ restriction.

Custom Apps:
Average All
Modes Plus

They will be available again soon on my website.
You could possibly do it with RM.

E.g.
If lux < n and it’s sunset -30 then change to evening mode

Andy

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In ST they had a 'if things quiet down' type trigger

You could do...
In RM:
if no motion: here & here & here and it's within sunset -30 then set mode, but I'm not sure how well that would work if the home is quiet during the day.

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Mabey add a time window, quite downstairs busy upstairs in this time window change to ev

What did the old ST app do?
Do you have a link?

I have tried to make our house as fully automated as possible. I have no voice control at all, and although I have button controllers for lights in every room I consider my programming a failure if we have to use any. The only exception to that are the buttons that control our bedroom reading lamps which we manually turn off, and different lights in the Living Room which we control with the Home Control buttons on the Harmony Remote depending on what we are doing. All other lights are switched on and off by either motion/lux level or mode.

Night to Daytime mode switch starts at a specific (user defined) time.
Daytime to Evening mode switch is determined by external lux levels (within a time period).
Evening to Night mode is triggered by switching the TV off if it's later than 9:30 pm.

I have a rule that checks for motion in the house and various switches being on (eg TV). if everything is off and there is no motion anywhere for 10 minutes it presumes we have gone out and reduces the heating temperature by 1 Deg C and also won't turn on certain mode lighting lamps etc until we return.

I have voice announcements to tell us the dishwasher or washer dryer has finished, or we've left the garage door open or the oven/hob on etc.

It has taken ages to get all the various settings correct but, if I say so myself, it works very well now. We call the system Jeeves and that's what I'm aiming for - replicating a butler running everything efficiently and discretely mostly behind the scenes except when you need them.

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I'm working on an app I call "Sleepy House". It's similar to motion lighting in some ways, but it's specialized for nighttime, when most of the members of my family are asleep, but some occasionally get up for a bit. You can define "Sleepy Rooms" and pick the switches/dimmers/motion sensors that are in them. So, when it's "nighttime":

  • If there's no activity in a room, it should tend to go to sleep after a bit: dim down and then go dark.
  • If you enter a room, it should wake up in a dimmed state. (So it doesn't blind you.)
  • It should make sure that "off" dimmers are preset to a very low level. So that if you enter a room and manually turn a switch on, the light comes on dimmed instead of blinding you with the force of a thousand suns.

I'll be releasing this soon.

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I use some time and some event based (sunrise/sunset) triggers to trigger my scenes. However @cobra gave me an idea to combine the lux and event based triggers to help. I find sometimes in the evenings or mornings they kick in when its too bright or too dim still. I'll have to think on this a bit as I don't want them to kick in on a cloudy day in the middle of the day.

Also, my night scene only automatically kicks in if nobody's home at 1am. However if somebody is home it won't kick in until we tell Alexa good night or latest 2:30 am (in case we forget).

I've never been a fan of the "smart lighting modes" in regards to lights turning on/off automatically, however I am currently playing with the ideas. Right now I have my bathroom lights turn on at night at a dim level when you walk in. I want to see how that goes. I also want to add some strip lights to my bed that come on when we get up at night or when the dog walks around.

Other automations revolve around voice announcements for certain events, things that happen based on presence, adjusting thermostat's based on doors/widows states and presence and some other stuff.

Took a long time to get this to work reliably, I've had to write a number of my own apps and rewrite a number of drivers to get it to play nicely, but it is running very reliably.

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I LOVE that you have that vision. That's exactly what my vision has been, and I feel like I'm well on my way to achieving that.
I have 4 modes
Quiet time
home
Night
Away
I strive to make it so that I never have to ask or press a button in an every day situation. I can't say it never happens, but it is few and far between. I hope you find this interesting.

Night, quiet time, and home is dictated by phones docked on two modified Qi chargers. I'll link the project at the bottom. This is how the day works
Both phones docked on chargers triggers night mode. Everything turns off. Indirect lighting above my cabinets dims and becomes a night light. I'll talk about the significance of that lighting later.
In the morning one person gets up and undocks phone, quiet time starts. Keeps the bedroom lights muted to not wake the sleeping spouse (me) while loving husband prepares to leave for work. Kitchen and dining room can lights and cabinet lights only interact on motion. They are bright enough to see what you're doing. We use this setup mostly because you only need lots of lights when you're actually doing something in the kitchen. Like baking. Second phone undocks, mode changes to home. All lights interact normally except for the kitchen and dining. Just cabinets and cans unless we're moving around in there for more than 10 minutes. Then the room lights will turn on. That usually happens more in the evening and not in the morning. the big lights will turn on in home mode if activity exceeds 10 minutes. It's worked well for us. Between 5pm and 7pm, the kitchen/dining lights all interact as that would normally be dinner hour and clean up. I could probably eliminate that rule because our activity keeps the lights on without having to have a full on rule to do that for me. We also have several motion sensors in the room to achieve this. Even one by the stove and pointed down at the counters and tables. My cabinet lights brighten up to 100% when you enter the room and dim back down where activity stops. This is enough light to see when you need a drink of water or something simple. Half of the lights turn off in night mode and will only brighten up to 50% on activity.

Our basement lights trigger with a motion sensor at the bottom of the steps before entering the room. The light will remain on if I am in my office as I have motion sensors facing my computer keyboard and work bench. As long as those lights are on, then the living room lights will be on. If the tv is turned on in the room, the lights will dim to 50% and remain on until the tv is off, my den is quiet and activity has stopped in that room.
Upper living room lights turn on with motion, off when inactive, but will not turn on if the tv is on up there. There is a lamp by our door that dims and brightens according to the lighting scheme. Lots of restrictions.
Garage lights turn on when a door opens or a lock code is entered or activity is detected. Off when all doors are closed and locked and activity is stopped. Locks auto lock after two minutes. All of my other rooms are simple lighting. On with activity and off when quiet. Closet door opens and turns on the closet light and off when it closes. Same with pantry. If I let the dogs out and open the patio door, the back light turns on and remains on until i close the door the second time when they come in. Works really well.
Away works on presence and home also triggers when one of us arrives home. Quiet time happens when one phone is docked in the bedroom. Night is two phones docked.
When I started this journey, my husband laid down the edict that he would NOT do anything special to get lights to turn on. I've adhered to that and set things up to follow our habits.
here is the link to our Qi chargers. I hope you find some inspiration in this post.

[EDIT]
I do use some multisensors also to restrict lights turning on when not needed. I also set the fan speed according to temperature in the bedroom at night. Works like a charm.
[ANOTHER EDIT]
Outside lights, cabinet lights and a table lamp turn on 60 minutes before sunset and off 60 minutes after sunrise. The table lamp will turn off in night mode and back on if mode changes to quiet time or home if it's before sunrise. The cabinet lights will do the same if mode changes and it's before sunrise.

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That's why I say it must be after sunset -30 AND below a lux level

I confess it does take a while to get the levels of lux and the time before sunset right :slight_smile:

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@april.brandt this should inspire us all. Thanks.

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Awh - stahp. I'm blushing. You have some pretty inspiring stuff yourself. You all do.

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I setup @ogiewon’s bed presence solution. This sets the mode based on when we are both in bed and day when one of us gets up in the morning. My wife recently told me this is her favorite automation I have done in recent months.

See this thread for details:

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I meant to ask you Geoff, how is this working out for you?

Yes good thanks. I ended up with a temperature difference based system for the hob detection. With a sensor fixed to the extractor hood, to give a difference to room ambient. It took a bit of finessing to get the values to work well, and I now look at both the temperature delta and rate of change to determine if we've left a gas ring on. I ended up with these rules: If the delta is over 7 Deg C then a ring is definitely on. If it's below 4 Deg C it's off as even the smallest ring gets it above that, and if it's between the 2 and falling by more than 0.2 Deg C compared to the previous delta it's also off. I had to add that last proviso or it gave a false positive for quite a while after everything had been turned off.

For the oven, I added another sensor to my Iotawatt on the oven circuit and that even detects just an oven lamp being on.

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I'm thinking to do the same sort of thing - I feel an app coming on when I get some time to do normal coding :slight_smile:

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Only Abe Normal programing currently?

(It's a Young Frankenstein reference. :slight_smile: )

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Like it! :slight_smile:

I don't have time for anything new for a while.. still working on the code for the website and all the updates to existing and new apps already done.

I feel like I'm still in the early days of my automation, and it's progressing in finding the routines we have as a family that I can help out.

I have 4 modes;

  1. Home
  2. Away (no-one's home, but we are in town doing errands or something)
  3. Sleep (everyone is in bed or close to being in bed)
  4. Vacation (Security lock-down and simulations like we are home).
  • I have home always start at a specific time in the morning, unless we are Away or on Vacation.
  • Lights turn on and off based on sunrise sun-set and in the mornings as a way to get the kids out of bed and have some extra light even post-sun-set. I'm with Cobra in the aspect that I do eventually want to use LUX to help augment how long lights should stay on or if they should turn on earlier
  • Motion sensor for lights, time based when they trigger. Future Lux for how bright
  • Garage Door stuff - I automatically switch off the garage door power when we are on vacation, and any other mode turns it back on. I'm considering if "sleep" should turn in on/off. I'm just been worried if that could cause harm to my chamberlain doing that so often every night or not.
  • I use Alexa Guard to randomize my lights while on vacation to simulate being home. I need to figure out how to do this for my Sonos as well to have Music playing. I also want to trigger music playing if there is motion or an 'alarm' in any of my away or vacation modes. The challenge I'm running into is with playlists for Sonos (haven't looked into it enough).

Those are most of my 'automations' today which gear towards Lights, and security.

The rest are mostly about sensors (water leaks, temp, smart locks, etc.)