Do you have any home automation projects in the works?

Whether built, bought, or somewhere in between, what are the robots in your home doing these days?

Comments

[ohffs]

I've got a bunch of Ikea 'Tradfri' lights and a Netatmo 'smart' thermostat. They're all hooked up to Alexa and Homekit and I've been playing around with some homeassistant stuff running off a raspberry pi. One of the especially pointless things I did was make the lamp beside my work desk pulse a little when a torrent file finishes downloading on the headless pi ;-) I felt ridiculously pleased with myself ;-)

[Vincent Milum Jr]

instagram.com/p/BrY1TEZhs_-/ <<< WiFi enabled Christmas tree. The controller is accessible over HTTP and animations are written in Lua, so easy updating without recompiling or uploading via a serial cable.

[Mihail Malo]

I have a home that should be finished in the summer, and I am very much at a loss of how to outfit it.
Probably Xiaomi sensors and TRÅDFRI bulbs on Texas Instruments CC2530 ZigBee dongles, some KNX stuff for other light fixtures, shutters, and heating, and networked Mitsubishi HVAC equipment.
Most of it will probably be home-assistant(hass.io), because:

1. It understands the difference between events, state reports, and commands. (instead of trying to shove them all into a flat table where commands overwrite state, and identical state reports fire events)
2. It has a pleasant and ergonomic, mobile-ready end user UI, with material design and smart defaults (eg, all values can be expanded as time-based graphs), instead of iOS4/jQuery mobile style or skeuomorphic devices on a map.
3. It bets strongly on the Apple HomeKit protocol. I never intend to use an Apple TV, handheld, or hub, but they are also working (with results) on consuming HomeKit-native appliances, which will only proliferate, into itself, not only exposing its own devices to your iCloud.

Please tell me why I'm wrong and generally stupid, and what I should use instead. Save me from myself.

[ComputerSmiths]

I do a lot of temperature/humidity/power monitoring with Raspberry Pi and other linux boxes. Control is dicey, my big question is “ what is the fallback when it fails and I’m away? “. You would not belive the number of times I’ve gotten the “There’s no {Water, Power, Internet, etc}!!!” call from my wife. Just set the probability of something failing to 100% and see if it’s survivable. Monitoring good, control bad. 🙈 Cloud services will fail at random and when the company goes out of business, I know folks who can’t turn their lights on without a 15-year old X-10 master control box. 🤪

[George]

I recently bought a new kettle but didn't realise that it could be connected to a phone and alexa. I'm currently working on hooking it into my raspbery pi so that when i turn my alarm clock off in the morning it'll start boiling the water, all ready for the tea!

[Mpho Mphego]

A while back, I created a home automation project as part of my degree requirement and fortunately enough I documented most of my work.
Check it out goo.gl/yuYdRq

In short: it is a Smart Home Automation using Raspberry Pi and Arduino

[ItsASine (Kayla)]

Things in my apartment right now:

• Hue lights in every personal light system (so lamps but not ceiling fixtures)
  • Turns itself on when boyfriend is getting ready for work and off by the time he should have left
  • Dims a half hour before bed, gradually turning off by the time its bedtime
• Alexa with an Echo and Echo Dot (though boyfriend has a Google Home... I don't touch it)
  • Mostly used to check the weather or yell at it to turn on/off the Hue lights
  • It now can play Skyrim too
• Logitech Bridge that barely works. It will turn on the TV but it is terribly finicky about my wifi. I need to fix it since it basically can automate anything with a remote.
• Wemo Smart Plug that I used for Christmas lights
• Withings (now Nokia) Smart Scale to sync my weight to The Cloud so various health apps can yell at me
• IFTTT to tie everything together with the general internet (most useful right now is to get the scale to talk to Fitbit)
• I have a firewall on its way to secure the whole set up, too
• A Petcube and Amazon Cloud Cam to watch my cats while I'm at work. The Cloud Cam has a better app and quality but the Petcube, being actually designed for this, has a laser pointer to play with them. I still vote Cloud Cam, to be honest.

If I ever own a place, I'll deck out more and install fixtures like locks and stuff. But for now, I like this set up with my little apartment. Only things I'm tempted to improve are 1. a wifi Roomba since I hate cleaning 2. a wifi slow cooker so I can check on it while I'm at work and 3. an IoT router to play with.

[Gabriel Guzman]

I've been setting up a "home dashboard" to collect a bunch of metrics that I expect to one day send to it! I also have a few temperature sensors sitting on my desk that I'm meaning to sprinkle around my apartment to see how temperature distribution works in my apartment. Otherwise, I have a few IoT connected lights that turn on and off automatically. Nothing out of the ordinary!

[Kat]

My number one thing is to try to make my tassimo wireless. Why? Because I am lazy but the initial design has a couple of assumptions. That a cup is there and the coffee is in place.

I want to do it for fun mostly, no profit and the fact that I got the tassimo for free helps things.

It doesn't make things faster and it's mostly as a hobby project. Gains are in skills acquired I guess.

[Ashish Kapoor]

Yeah I keep an eye of my home office's temperature with an RPI and trying to turn Air-conditioning on before I enter there each morning.