Home Automation

All of my devices are homekit compatible, but I do not want to use the Apple Home app because it's pretty much broken IMHO. I was suggested these alternatives. Did anyone have experience with these, or other recommendations? I have Hue and Aidot lights and sync boxes. A Homepod mini, an M2 Mac Mini, 2 iPads, an iPhone 13, and smart plugs, and a camera.

“Eve for HomeKit,” “iHaus Smart Home,” “Devices – Control for HomeKit,” or “Home+ 5.”

>EDIT: I also tell Siri to perform tasks, mainly turning the fan on and off, but she frequently gets it wrong. She also can't seem to figure out how to play requested music through the AppleTV, and always wants to play it through the Homepod Mini. The

AppleTV constantly tells me I've reached my device playback limit when I'm only playing back on maybe one other device, and even that isn't intentional; I only ever want to play on one device at a time. As for the Home app, it often loses connection with lights that are functioning properly in both the Hue and Aidot apps. If the lights are from Hue, the app doesn’t allow me to remove them entirely; I can only hide them from view. Consequently, when I ask Siri to ‘turn off all the lights,’ she informs me that 15 accessories aren’t responding. Even if I remove them from the Hue app and re-add them, the old ‘phantom’ lights still appear in the Home app. Deleting and reinstalling the Home app, which I’ve done about four times recently, is a huge hassle and requires me to set up everything again from scratch. My biggest gripe is the lack of fun and delightful preset color schemes available in Home. It doesn’t recognize when lights are set to certain colors through other apps, preventing me from saving those colors as a theme. Additionally, the color picker in the Home app is subpar.

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A few friends asked for me to walk through how I set up the dashboard I have in my kitchen, so I figured I'd share it here, too. Here is a barebones walkthrough with config files.

Hopefully this is helpful to somebody else here. For those who don't know, BOINC is a tool that enables you to donate your computer's spare computational power towards scientific research. Cancer, alzheimers, climate research, you name it, there's a BOINC project for it. And when your computer is computing, it generates heat. It's as efficient as using a space heater or any other form of "electric resistive" heating aka anything that's not a heat pump/reverse ac. 1 watt into your computer = 1 watt of heat, same as any space heater, electric baseboard heater, ceiling heat, etc.

In winter, BOINC and Folding at home make up 100% of my indoor heating, and I wrote a script to tie this all to a thermostat. It will turn BOINC on/off depending on the room temp, and if you have multiple machines you can have each at a separate setpoint to give you slightly more granular control than "off" vs "full blast". The script can pull in data from a web url (what I use), a command-line command, or a custom python function.

Hello team,

I'm looking for a smart switch module like Sonoff MINIR4 https://sonoff.tech/product/diy-smart-switches/minir4/ that could work as a Thread border router.

I came across an announcement of MINIR4M that would support Matter but it's supposed to communicate over Wi-Fi. Alternatively, I've noticed that some users flash their Sonoff devices with Tasmota to enable Thread communication but I'm a complete newbie here and have no idea whether some version of this firmware could extend MINIR4 with Thread.

Do you know any devices like this. I'm happy with any example, not only Sonoff. Also happy to spend a whole flashing custom firmwares.

Thank you!

cross-posted from: https://lemmyonline.com/post/53654

> I dug through the prime deals and picked out the relevant devices, for which I have personal experience using, and would recommend to others. > > Every device linked, will work with home assistant, more or less natively. The majority of them, are flashable to esphome or tasmota. And ALL of them will work 100% locally.

Is there any way to get data from an Amazon smart thermostat (eg. Heating/cooling state current temperature, etc) into influxdb? If so, how? Thanks.

"I am one of these people, and I am only getting worse over time, which is why I have converted my smart home to Home Assistant, the home automation solution for true freaks."

I'm OK with that. 🤣

All this week, The Verge is reviewing their picks for the top 5 smart home platforms - including Home Assistant.

Their list:

1. Amazon Alexa
2. Apple Home
3. Google Home
4. Samsung SmartThings
5. Home Assistant

Just wondering how everyone is controlling their smart home these days. Do you use Alexa, Google, Siri or something else?

If you're running Home Assistant on an SBC other storage constrained device, you can now use available storage elsewhere on your network. Game changer, at least for me. Lots of other updates in this release, too.