Some smart home automations are simple but effective.When I walk into my home office, the lights will turn on, and when I leave, they turn off again.While I have plenty of functional automations like this, there are also some slightly weird ones that I use on a daily basis.
The sedentary monitor My smart speaker badgers me to get out of my chair I spend a lot of my working life sitting in front of a computer.It's all too easy to lose track of time and find I've been hunched over my keyboard for hours at a time.The problem is that this isn't good for my health.
Being sedentary has some significant health risks.These can be reduced by taking regular breaks to get in short bursts of exercise.Even breaking up sitting time with a few minutes of activity can help to reduce the risks.
That's why I built an automation that monitors when I'm sitting in my office chair, using a presence sensor with a zone set around the location of the chair.The sensor is accurate enough to tell when I'm in the chair, even if I'm staying relatively still.I have an automation that plays a spoken announcement through a smart speaker when I've been sitting in the chair for 30 minutes without a break.
It tells me fairly politely to get up and walk around.At increasingly shorter intervals, it nags me again in stronger terms, until it ends up reading a list of health conditions associated with a sedentary lifestyle, repeating every 30 seconds.It's surprisingly effective.
The continual nagging is enough to force me to get out of my chair and go and take a walk or do some exercise.Everything Presence Lite Compatibility ESP Home Weight 40g Featuring multi-target tracking, support for zones, light level sensing, Bluetooth proxy and support for multiple different mmWave sensors, the Lite offers next level features for a more pocket-friendly point.$39 at Everything Smart Technology Expand Collapse A TV remote in the shape of a cube Switching streaming apps is fun now Some smart home devices feel like solutions in search of a problem.
The Aqara Cube smart home controller feels like exactly that.It's a small plastic cube with a six-axis sensor inside that allows you to control your smart home with gestures.There are multiple possible triggers, including turning the cube to a specific face, rotating it, shaking it, throwing it in the air, and tapping it.
The challenge is finding a good way to use it.I ended up using my Aqara Cube to control my TV.We usually end up watching one of a handful of different streaming services or the live TV channels, and opening the different streaming apps on my smart TV always feels a little clunky.
I added labels to the sides of my Aqara Cube for the various streaming apps.Now, when I want to watch Netflix, I just flip the cube so that the Netflix side is face up, and my automation handles the rest.If the TV is off, the automation will turn it on first and then open the relevant app or input source.
My favorite part is that when I want to turn the TV on or off, I can just throw the cube into the air.It's utterly pointless, but it makes me smile every time.Related 5 Smart Home Automations I Thought I Wanted but Never Use Some automations are better in theory than they are in reality.
Posts 3 By Adam Davidson The procrastination monitor My smart home tells me to get back to work My smart speaker doesn't just nag me about sitting still for too long.It also gets on my case when I'm not focusing on my work.I regularly get distracted when working.
When researching an article, I'll end up falling down a rabbit hole after discovering some obscure post in a Home Assistant forum, and before I know it, I've lost half an hour that should have been spent working.The Home Assistant Companion app on my Mac exposes several sensors, including the Frontmost App sensor, which returns the name of the app that's currently in focus.There's also a binary sensor called binary_sensor.active that determines whether the computer is in use.
I have an automation that monitors the Frontmost App sensor and is triggered if I'm in a non-work app for more than one minute.It's also triggered if the computer is inactive for over a minute, which usually means I'm checking my phone.My smart speaker then nags me to get back to work and continues to do so until I'm back to working in an appropriate app.
Snarky descriptions for my video doorbell Visitors get roasted This automation really is pointless.It doesn't make my life easier or provide me with any useful information.It still runs almost every day, just because it's fun.
There's an integration called LLM Vision that can pass an image from Home Assistant to an LLM for analysis.You can use your own prompt to get the LLM to use the image however you want.When someone rings the doorbell, an automation passes a snapshot from the video doorbell to an LLM which then describes the person in the image in a snarky and sarcastic manner.
This description is then sent to my phone along with the snapshot image.It means whenever anyone rings the bell, I get an often-hilarious description of that person.Kitchen tidy reminder Familiar-sounding voices help me keep things tidy My office-based automations nag me in quite harsh language in order to get me to do what I'm supposed to.
I have another automation for the kitchen that works by being entertaining rather than belligerent.I have a motion sensor in the kitchen, and looking at the data, I realized that when the kids are at school, my wife or I enter the kitchen around 50 times a day.It occurred to me that if we put one or two things away each time we were there, it would be easier than having to tidy everything up at once.
This automation uses spoken announcements that are generated fresh each day, written by a local LLM.They use ElevenLabs voices that sound a little similar to minor celebrities.For example, one of the voices has the warm, authoritative feel of a classic British nature documentary narrator.
The LLM creates an announcement in a style to match the voice, suggesting that while we’re in the kitchen, it might be a good idea to clear something away.They often make me laugh, and it has genuinely made keeping the kitchen in order far less of a chore.Weird Home Assistant automations can still be useful While at least one of the automations on this list serves no purpose other than to amuse me, the rest are all genuinely useful.
Just because an automation is weird doesn't mean it can't become a key part of your smart home.
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