Share your automations

the_beginner

Disciple
Hey everyone... wondering what automations you guys are using. It can be a simple single smart bulb or 100+ devices connected to home assistant, just share yours. I bought 2 Syska 8W smart bulbs from flipkart (has connectivity issue and I don't recommend this to anyone).
 
I basically use around 10 smart sockets for controlling the water schedule of my hydroponics home garden. Some I use for measuring the power consumption of certain devices at home.
 
I recently started to put my Alexa echo dots to use with a couple of philips hue smart bulbs and my new LG C1 OLED TV in my bedroom, with the aim of further moving to a futuristic smart home setup.

It's not totally smooth sailing...

Sometimes after instructing Alexa to power the bulbs or TV on or off it either ignores or replies ok without anything actually happening.

Once I found the lights in the powered on state when I went to my room in the evening and don't know when or why they ended up like that, power cut or wifi issues, even though I have a whole home inverter in UPS mode and the router is in the same room.

After facing such niggles I've decided not to bother with further smart-ification of my home, especially stuff like power device like geysers or AC etc or smart locks etc lol. Don't want them turning on automatically unexpectedly or failing to lock or unlock when you need it the most
 
i have 60 + shelly devices running on wireless setup ( supported with 4 ubiquity Ap AC LR) access points across the house, these 60 devices runs every single, light, fan , geysers etc of the house.

i basically can control the entire house from anywhere. running on a seperate SSID for them, now planning on setting up a firewall again to protect all this.
 
i have 60 + shelly devices running on wireless setup ( supported with 4 ubiquity Ap AC LR) access points across the house, these 60 devices runs every single, light, fan , geysers etc of the house.

i basically can control the entire house from anywhere. running on a seperate SSID for them, now planning on setting up a firewall again to protect all this.
Please make a separate post if possible with of your networking and firewall setup. I am also looking at making a ubiquiti/omada setup.
 
Are there 3 pin power plugs with digital timers built into them, so that they automatically activate at certain time of the day.
For eg., LED bulb above in-house potted plant should lighten up @11am and shut down @5pm everyday without human intervention.
Any hints pls...

Will a device like this work:
 
i have 60 + shelly devices running on wireless setup ( supported with 4 ubiquity Ap AC LR) access points across the house, these 60 devices runs every single, light, fan , geysers etc of the house.

i basically can control the entire house from anywhere. running on a seperate SSID for them, now planning on setting up a firewall again to protect all this
60+ is a lot of devices... how is ur family reacting to this big automation setup.. Are they comfortable? coz i couldn't automate my home with my parents around since it's hard for them to operate. Lot of the words that u have mentioned is new to me (like shelly, ubiquity Ap AC LR) where do u learn all these... I've read about home assistant a bit... that's all i know...
Are there 3 pin power plugs with digital timers built into them, so that they automatically activate at certain time of the day.
For eg., LED bulb above in-house potted plant should lighten up @11am and shut down @5pm everyday without human intervention.
Any hints pls...

Will a device like this work:
Just search "smart plugs" in amazon/flipkart.... most of the listed ones can do this i guess...
 
I recently started to put my Alexa echo dots to use with a couple of philips hue smart bulbs and my new LG C1 OLED TV in my bedroom, with the aim of further moving to a futuristic smart home setup.

It's not totally smooth sailing...

Sometimes after instructing Alexa to power the bulbs or TV on or off it either ignores or replies ok without anything actually happening.

Once I found the lights in the powered on state when I went to my room in the evening and don't know when or why they ended up like that, power cut or wifi issues, even though I have a whole home inverter in UPS mode and the router is in the same room.

After facing such niggles I've decided not to bother with further smart-ification of my home, especially stuff like power device like geysers or AC etc or smart locks etc lol. Don't want them turning on automatically unexpectedly or failing to lock or unlock when you need it the most
I also got one smart bulb and it worked great. Was quite happy. Got two more. One behaves in the manner you described. So have stopped. I just use my Alexa DOT (given as a gift from office) to launch songs. For this reason I would never ever attach a smart plug to a device like a geyser or charging unit. The tech. is totally flawed and unreliable at the moment.
 
60+ is a lot of devices... how is ur family reacting to this big automation setup.. Are they comfortable? coz i couldn't automate my home with my parents around since it's hard for them to operate. Lot of the words that u have mentioned is new to me (like shelly, ubiquity Ap AC LR) where do u learn all these... I've read about home assistant a bit... that's all i know...

Just search "smart plugs" in amazon/flipkart.... most of the listed ones can do this i guess...
family is pretty happy with it, given its a villa and with a small kid it was always leaving fans, lights AC's etc randomly powered on , also while woodwoork was going on i added close to 40+ points for my electrical needs in my house.

for a G+1 house there is over 100 meters of profile lights , 40+ 10 watt lights, 57 spot lights , 7 fans and 6 AC's. some crazy amount of wiring i got done to run all of this seamlessly with independent wires being terminated until the switch board.

now next was to power back this up which is now backed up with a 5kw luminous inverter, which runs my entire house ( light + fan + chimney + desktops) + dishwasher + 2 AC's when there is a power cut and still left for more.


adding all of this made me consume 500+ units in winters itself so which is now backed up with a 5kw solar on grid setup ( polycab 5kw 3 phase inverter + 12x 440 watt panels) that give me steady 26+ units everyday in jan itself.


now comes the automation. imported close to 48 shelly 2.5 units ( each can handle 2 points) so about 96 points + shelly PM1 for 16A sockets ( geyser , ac etc).
the primary concern in automation is more devices is standard wifi routers cannot handle multiple devices. hence i have 4 AP AC LR ( Ap - access point , AC - latest wifi standard , LR - Long range 300 M) across the house, each has throughput of 1 Gbps over wifi on dual band 2.4 & 5 Ghz ( this is what you have in corporate & hotels) with all fancy security feautures. so ISP > Gigabit router > 4 - POE> 4 Access points. so every nook and corner of house now has 300M internet speed ( ISP 300M plan), seperate SSID for shelly devices, seperate 5 ghz for all TV's ( nvidia sheild, firestick, smart tv, ) desktops and phones, one seperate SSID for my solar inverter to connect to monitor it remotely.


now comes the usage, my wife has not touched any switches since months, everything works on alexa with voice commands and she says it smuch better than finding out what switch is for what?

i can remotely monitor the power consumption, set automation for garden lights, elevation lights to turn on at sunset, geysers to auto off at 25 mins so no power is wasted etc.

good wifi is backbone for seamless automation.
 
Brilliant thread by @superczar
Must read, but it’s a bit advanced/end goal setup style
 
Are there 3 pin power plugs with digital timers built into them, so that they automatically activate at certain time of the day.
For eg., LED bulb above in-house potted plant should lighten up @11am and shut down @5pm everyday without human intervention.
Any hints pls...

Will a device like this work:

I have this https://www.amazon.in/Wipro-monitoring-appliances-Assistant-DSP1100/dp/B08HNB2FSH

You can set the time in it using the App, it then sets it in the device, you can also control it from anywhere as long as it is connected to the Internet
 
Not exactly an automation, but I have set up a raspberry pi 4 running ubuntu mate to do various things.
1. Wireguard VPN server
2. NAS server to save files, watch videos over SMB
3. Pi-Hole + DNS Crypt
4. Bitwarden Password Manager
5. A popular torrent client to download stuff (legal ubuntu ISOs ;)) as they get released.
6. ASF (If I am in the mood)
7. jDownloader (for totally legal windows 10 isos ;))
8. Matrix Synapse client for selfhosted messaging service. Have added bridges for most of my platforms, so now I get messages in a single app.

All of this uses docker. Have attached a full body aluminum heat sink with dual fans to keep things cool. Load averages are stable and so far the setup has been running almost non stop for more than a year now.
 
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