I have my dock plugged into a smart plug and the laptop set in the BIOS to turn on when it receives power. I have an NFC tag on my coffee machine that I bloop while I’m making my morning brew, and that turns the dock on so that everything’s ready when I move into the office.

For turning things off I have HASS.Agent installed and sending state updates (locked, unlocked, etc, which is useful for other automations) and when that sensor goes unavailable for 15 minutes it turns the plug off. I find that’s long enough to allow it to reboot for updates and what not.

The sensor does report shutdown, reboot, and sleep states but I found that it often happens too quickly to get the change sent, so the unavailable state is more reliable.

Thanks for the re-upvote. My guess is it was someone who sets timers on their phone. 😂

Dammit, now you’ve got my head swimming with ways to improve the washing machine stuff. I bet a vibration sensor on top could be combined with the smart plug power monitoring to detect when it’s being emptied.

How did you do the Google-turning-on-the-smartplug thing? I feel like I’m missing a lot of tricks by not having HA integrated into those. I just use them for audible notifications currently.

The whole point of home automation is that it’s automated. Setting a timer on your phone is for chumps.

I have a similar thing to notify us when the washing machine is done, only without the cool presence stuff - I’ll have to look into your setup for that!

I also use a smart plug to monitor our toaster. Not for notifications but because it uses a mechanical timer that if it fails, will also fail to turn the element off, so it comes with dire warnings about always unplugging it after use. Instead I just have HA setup to turn off the plug if it ever draws power for more than 4 minutes.

Z2M. I had a ZHA setup and I’ll give it to them, it was super easy to setup (barely an inconvenience). Then I bought a set of sockets with power monitoring but found that they used a non-standard way of reporting those stats.

They were seemingly quite new and both ZHA and Z2M had ‘quirks’ submitted very quickly to make them work, but while the Z2M quirk was approved and added almost straight away, 2 or 3 months later I was still waiting for the ZHA one to be approved.

Then, like you, I wanted to change the Zigbee channel and took the opportunity to switch to Z2M where the sockets and their power monitoring have been working perfectly ever since. It’s definitely more complicated to setup initially but you get more control overall and, at least from my experience, the overall device support is much better.

Note: I did initially have loads of stability issues when making the switch, but it was due to me flashing the combined Zigbee+Thread firmware to my Sonoff stick. The fix was to turn off the OpenThread Border Router in the Silabs addon and then everything was stable again. I don’t have any Thread devices yet, of course.

I’d post mine but it’s just the default overview. I really should put some effort into making something good.

I have something like this setup for my porch lights. Light goes on when it detects motion, then it uses wait_for_trigger to wait until the motion stops before starting a 20 second and turning off the lights.

All simple enough so far but, crucially, the “mode” for the automation is set to restart. That way if the sensor detects motion during the 20 second countdown it cancels the whole run and starts again from the top.

Yes, I always called them catapults as a kid and I guess it stuck!

I don’t know if this counts but I was always disappointed that real life pea shooters and water pistols were nothing like their comic representations, that worked like machine guns and hoses respectively. I suppose the closest we ever got was the Super Soaker.

Oh, and I’ve never seen a catapult made from a Y shaped stick.

Haha I literally setup this exact thing yesterday, and then spent ages making Telegram notifications that delete themselves after a set time, so as not to clog up the feed. Because what’s the point of knowing that someone was at the door after they’ve left?

Those Aqara buttons are so tiny and cute!

This reminds me of working for a UK developer back in the PS2 days. From what I remember, one of the coders there wrote a tool that enabled the comparatively cheap QA test kits that would only boot from a CD/DVD to appear to dev PCs as full blown dev kits (that cost 4 or 5 times the price) and boot code pushed to them over the network.

They didn’t have as much memory or processing grunt so there was still need for a few proper dev kits, but it saved them a fortune in hardware costs. Pretty sure it was an open secret that Sony reluctantly allowed, and most of the UK dev studios were using it at one point.

I spent a lot of time watching Vacuum Wars on Youtube before buying my Roborock, and they consistently came out at the top or very close to it in pretty much every category.

Was a bit of a pain to get one in the UK because they left the market after brexit but I’ve been very happy with it.

There’s a shopping list in HA?

This is the best primer that I’ve found: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/10/what-passkey

The main advantage is that, like hardware security keys, they’re immune to Man in the Middle phishing attacks, but are far simpler to use so should hopefully see much more widespread use.

I love it!

Wait, reddit premium is a thing? 😂