What Did / Do You Find Hard About Home Automation?

Same here. All my program languages are obsolete but I can still manage to cobble together a little code in js or even drivers but RM just throws me off. My network is pretty much built other than when @aaiyar pushes me down another rabbit hole (ecowitt here tomorrow), so I decided to stay with RM4.

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Look forward to seeing you in the EcoWitt "rabbit hole"... :slight_smile:

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The tech was easy. The hard thing for me to learn was to listen to what my wife wanted and not to try and over automate everything. I have some rooms where the lighting is controlled by motion sensors or door contacts, and they work fine, but I have some rooms where my wife wants to use the dumb switch on the wall. She is no dummy (after all she married me :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:) but like many things it was a compromise and I needed to learn to live with it.

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Glad to see you have successfully setup your cameras @rlithgow1... Well "glad" might be a stretch.... :wink: Now Google will have that in my history.... (I am also lazy....)

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That's where I was going with the RM thread I started up. I was hoping to stir some conversations about how to accomplish different things with RM and maybe expose some of the genius ideas that people have come up with.

On topic, my biggest/hardest part is being forward thinking. I started with just automating lighting in bathrooms, so I just bought motion sensors. That, before long, turned into wanting to automate the exhaust fans, so I ended up buying separate humidity sensors. Going back to the start, I should have just bought a 4-in-1 for each bathroom.

The other hard part is just being creative enough to figure out how to do something. Like right now, I'm trying to figure out how to tell HE that my wife and I are in bed. I've seen pressure sensors being used, but having something directly under the sheets in a non-started. I have three 50 lbs dogs, so I'd also need to figure out how to keep false-positives from occurring. I thought to use an Android app called Automate and have a flow in there to hit an endpoint in RM. But, the start of that flow would be to check for the phone being on a wireless charger. Problem there is that I have nothing but wireless chargers around the house. We also don't have a really consistent time that we hit the sack. So, even constraining the rule to a timeframe could have it getting triggered while staying up late playing video games.

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For that exact reason I use a Samsung / Aeotec button predominantly to switch modes

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Is it sad that I don't even want to have to press a button? :smiley:

Only because it would be a simple option.... But don't let that stop you from looking for an alternative...

I'm trying to do something similar. Assuming you and your wife go to bed at the same time, a combination of

  1. No motion in living areas
  2. Recent motion in bedroom
  3. Phone on wireless charger

Could work?

On the original topic, my answer is simple....cost.

I have lots of ideas and lots of plans. I'm not sure if technically I'll be able to achieve what i want to do when i try it, but primarily, funding is the main stumbling block :joy:

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Trying to figure out the mystery that are the Z-Wave mesh routing rules and signal propagation... dark magic! :mage:

I.O.W. - How to build a large robust setup for your location and actually have all aspects working as expected.

You really have to do it a couple of times (trial and error!) before you get a good sense of what you need to do..

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Not to get off topic, but you can use these cameras with Blue Iris. In BI you can also set these cameras to trigger a virtual motion sensor in Hubitat via MakerAPI.

For me, the hardest part is knowing when to stop.

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That's actually an easy one... ugh... never?

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See...this is where I get stuck.

That would work...96% of the time. But, that would also get triggered if we're gaming and someone walks through the bedroom to use the bathroom. Now...I gotta solve for that 4% before I do anything.

I think this is where the new batch of occupancy sensors coming on the market will really make a difference - like the Aqara FP1 - you'd probably still need motion sensors for fast response though.

Start with the button and once you get everything working, all that's left is replacing the button. I think it's harder than it seems to get the non-button part right. It's easy to think "when we're in bed..." but what about the once a year cases? Both are sick and in bed...

Once you get it all working perfectly so that 'replace-the-button' is the last remaining step... there may be tech that helps. :smiley:

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"What do you find hard about home automation?"

Leaving it alone. I'm constantly trying things out, looking for something else to automate, creating some newfangled complicated rule. I'm messing around with some part of it nearly every single day. It drives my wife nuts!

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Yep, those corner cases are a PITA :rofl: