18min chapter

Home Assistant Podcast cover image

Using Home Assistant as a second brain with Brian

Home Assistant Podcast

CHAPTER

Streamlining Home Automation with Technology

Exploring the challenges and solutions in setting up Home Assistant, managing mobile presence, and automating household tasks. Discussions on optimizing grocery shopping, leveraging APIs, and integrating smartphone features for daily tasks. Detailed insights on inventory management using technology tools like barcode scanning and automation, along with the Battery Notes integration for Home Assistant.

00:00
Speaker 3
Well, I think you found even initially when you were installing it, Phil, I think you were saying that there's still some Cloud dependencies for Home Assistant itself to continue on with the install. I didn't- Yeah, there was, I think- Yeah, I haven't been able to rebuild mine, but-
Speaker 2
This is like years ago now, but I think I was trying to install Home Assistant, and I think there was a dependency on the map, and I didn't have internet at the time, and I couldn't choose my location on the map or skip that section, whatever. Yeah. Yeah. I think I'm sure that's been addressed by now. Yeah, this was- Yeah. That's cool. Do
Speaker 3
you do any mobile-based presence and stuff like that too?
Speaker 1
The only one I'm doing that on right now is my iPhone, but I am planning to expand that to my wife. So a bit of a funny one on the spousal approval factor. So I didn't want to immediately rush to, hey, install this app or do this thing to let me see where you are all the time kind of a thing. Yeah. So all I did was rely on, you know, is my wife on or off the network, and there's actually a really good- Yeah. I think it's a hacks integration for the Amazon era, so you can see what's on the network and what's not. So right now, it's based on whether my wife is attached to the network or not. The problem that I've found is that every once in a while, that integration will hang and it won't see her as home or away. It'll go to unknown. And so we've had it before where I'll leave the house to go pick up one of the kids and not know that that has happened. So my wife's current status is unknown, and then the house will turn off all the lights and lock the door and do all the things. And she's like, oh, the house doesn't see me as a person again. So I think what I want to do and what I've done with my phone is I haven't not using the Home Assistant app mobile presence. I'm using own trucks. And that one has been, again, it's another one that's been absolutely rock solid as far as, you know, it knows exactly where I am. I've kind of helped it along a little bit by having some automations on my iPhone, just to kind of give it updates when I leave the house and when I hit work. But otherwise, yeah, it's as far as my presence, it's been solid. So I think I'm going to update my wife's phone. And then my oldest daughter has, we just got her a phone not too long ago. And since she's one of the ones that will, you know, she's the one that'll stay home and watch the other two. If I've got the three of us together, then, you know, we'll be largely covered, you know, in laws and stuff can still throw a wrench in the plan. But, you know, I think I can, I think I can add enough knowledge in there from the, from the Euro integration that, you know, certain phones are attached. That means the in-laws are around. So, you know, throw it in guest mode and don't shut everything off.
Speaker 3
Yeah, fair enough. It's, I think that's something I've always like, I'd love to get to the point where I have, you know, friends or family or whatever, their phones and stuff that like marked and basically like, if this person comes on, then just turn on guest mode, right? Yep. So you're past 11 p.m. or whatever, especially because like some of my light automations are based around that. So like when I say good night, it won't turn off the the guest bedroom lights and stuff like that.
Speaker 2
But yeah,
Speaker 3
that would be
Speaker 2
corporates doing Bluetooth tracking on customers really throw a spanner in the smart home world, right? Because, you know, we would be able to see, oh, yeah, this Bluetooth MAC address came with my friend was over. That must be his phone, right? I can just back that. Now, of course, all the MAC addresses are randomized. So Apple and, you know, all that randomism. So, when you go to Walmart, you're not tracked where you're going around the store, right?
Speaker 3
Right. Yeah. So that's where you still have to rely on Wi-Fi, right? So Wi-Fi is randomized, too, but it's not randomized, it's randomized per SSID. So I can still see repeat people already. It'll still be the same on their society every time, but it won't be.
Speaker 2
I don't know. How many, what's the data price in Canada though? Like, I don't know. I have friends coming over and saying, man, what's your Wi-Fi passwords right away, right? Like, if I'm just whole. Oh, 100% 100%.
Speaker 3
It's just depends on my friends, right? The ones, there's a few that have corporate phones that don't care. And there's a few that, again, pay for their own phone plans, and they're like, hey, let me jump on Wi-Fi, right? So it depends on who it is. But
Speaker 1
I'm cool. Like, sorry, go
Speaker 3
ahead, Brian. I've
Speaker 1
just thought about putting the old QR code like right next to the door, because that's everybody asks. Yeah. Yeah. Let's tell you. Yeah.
Speaker 3
I've actually wanted to 3D print a, like, a welcome QR code thing, and maybe stick like an NFC sticker on there so they can just tap it, and it'll just do it.
Speaker 2
Nice. But.
Speaker 3
Yeah, that's cool. That's another thing I don't have time for. So.
Speaker 1
That list keeps growing, man.
Speaker 3
I stopped keeping track of the list.
Speaker 2
But, well, and speaking of lists, like, Brian, do you have a list yourself that you are monitoring and how are you, like, if you have an ID for a smartphone, like automation, where are you putting it?
Speaker 1
So the one sort of end-all be-all project, and I saw, I ran across somebody who was doing it, and it looks absolutely brilliant. And I think it would save my wife a lot of time, and it would save a lot of heartache is some combination of, you know, what sort of food is already in the house. What do you want to plan for the week? And based off of those two things, put the order together, and then, you know, I saw somebody, and I don't remember which sort of grocery store they were using, but the grocery store exposed the API of the other mobile ordering. So they were actually able to tie it, like, the house. Knew what was in the house to a certain degree, if depending on whether you put it in, you know, a grocery or something like that. Yeah. And then they could go in and say, okay, this is what I want with those two things. They were like, all right, well, here's the list, then, and then it just literally went and ordered it. I'm like, I don't know if I want to give my home the credit card number. Those are the kinds of, I know how much time my wife spends on that every week, and it's, you know, it's significant. And that's, that's one of these so easy, like, hey, I want to do these three meals this week. Well, we know exactly what it takes to make those meals. So if you know what you have and you know what you need, you just go off and do that. But as far as list that I'm running right now, I don't, I don't have any, I keep looking for reasons to start creating them. And I haven't run across the, the need from my end yet. Mostly because I have other stuff, I've got reminders on my phone and stuff like that. But at some point, it's probably, it's probably better to consolidate because then I can do other things with notifications rather than just buzzing my phone and, yeah, me ignoring it while I'm out of the house, I can time it so that it reminds me when I come home rather than all I'm three hours away from the house. Yeah,
Speaker 3
fair enough. Yeah, that's
Speaker 2
why I'm really excited about the home is isn't like to do lists, right? Like a shopping lists, you know, been see them at the location of the grocery, then, you know, just ping me, hey, here's your, to do a busy shopping list, like that you've been adding to over the week. Don't forget to bring home these items while you're here, right? Yeah. Whereas I don't need to know that, you know, while I'm, I'm essentially.
Speaker 3
But at some point, like, like Siri and stuff on iPhone was supposed to do that, like not, not even Siri, like the Siri suggestions, right? Like when you're like, pull down on the iPhone, it gives you like the icons and stuff. Technically, it's, it's supposed to give you, and I guess it does kind of work. So like, for example, when I'm near Costco and I pull down, I'll get the Costco app, right? Like to show my membership. Oh, that's interesting. That kind of stuff. Yeah. I noticed that today because I was like, I never really use the Costco app. Outside of being like, here's my membership. So yeah, that I pulled down today. And I was like, Oh, Andy, okay.
Speaker 1
But yeah, and I used to do that with, with reminders. Like if my wife would ask me on my way home to pick something up, I would put it in my phone and say, Hey, when I get close to the grocery store, remind me, I will forget, especially if it's been a couple hours, it's been a couple of minutes half the time I forget. So the better I can, I can, you know, prep myself to stop and make sure that I'm, you know, not driving right past it again and get in trouble when I
Speaker 3
get home, better off for me. You can do it as much as you want. It's still, you're still going to get
Speaker 1
in trouble for something.
Speaker 3
I forgot this. I got everything else. Yeah.
Speaker 1
Once, once I get the rest of the house operating on the, the home assisted list, then hopefully there's a lot less argument.
Speaker 2
Yeah. I thought about like, putting some barco scanners around the house, like tying that into a grocery, but then I'm only going to be the one scanning, you know, products. It's, it's, you're
Speaker 3
just going to relegate yourself to being like, like an inventory person, right? Yeah. It's, it's like, it's an extra job you probably don't need.
Speaker 2
Like we had, we're doing the shopping the other day and I was like, oh, I need to get more of these. And so I just like put out my phone and, you know, because we're doing the shopping list on the phone, I'm doing like the ordering online. And I scanned it and my wife goes, oh, you're so annoying. Like that's so silly. Like, can you just type it in? I could, or I could just scan the barcode and it tells me the flavor, the product is just add to card, right? I was able to search for it and go. Yeah. So yeah, I feel
Speaker 1
better. Yeah. I started trying to do that with batteries for all the devices because, you know, I, I ran across one where I was changing out a battery. I was 99% sure I had a battery in the house, could not find it, ordered a bunch of them. And then three days later found the rest of them in the bottom of a drawer. So I had twice as many as I need. Yeah. So I've been, I've been thinking about automations like that where, you know, you know, how many you've got. And then, you know, when it dips below. Yep. 10%. And then goes back to 100, you, you know, pull one off because obviously you've gone ahead and changed the battery out. And then once you get past a certain number of batteries left, then it adds it to a list so that you know what to order from Amazon the next time you're, you're making an order. And
Speaker 2
Grocy is great for that. Like, like, I've got a blog post on, you know, how I automated it. I have to do it anymore. But, you know, like, I would have like, tracking, you know, dishwashing tablets, right? And then, because I know when the dishwasher runs, I can then tell Grocy, okay, deduct one from the stock level, and then gross, you'll be able to have a threshold, or even the 10 dishwashing tablets left to your shopping list next time, right? The problem is just keeping track of those stock levels. If you can automate them, fantastic. If not, then, yeah, then you just become, like, to keep inventory, right? And
Speaker 1
going around every day. Yeah, that's, that's what happened to me. So I started doing that with the, with the, the tabs for the washing machine. Yep. And, you know, I completely missed the fact that there was a new bucket of them down there, and I never updated the number. And now I think I'm at like minus 30 or something like that. I just don't update it.
Speaker 3
Yeah. There's actually a hacks integration called battery notes for home assistant.
Speaker 1
That thing is fantastic. Yeah,
Speaker 3
it's really good. I just started playing with it, like, a couple of weeks ago. And it seems pretty cool so far. Like, I mean, yeah, you can, what are the notes and stuff? It's, it's, think of it like a library for your devices, right? So you're like, hey, and it actually creates entities and stuff like that. So it'll tell you like, hey, battery type is I don't know, CR 123 or whatever it is, right? Like, and when the battery low is there, you can, it creates a bunch of different diagnostic sensors. And even something like, hey, when your battery's replaced, you click it and you can say, okay, this is how it is. And, you know, there's a bunch of different kind of things like that. I know I'm doing a really poor job explaining that, but I'm just not having, sorry, go ahead.
Speaker 2
I'm guessing the, the idea being that if a battery is low, I can then click on an entity and it will tell me, okay, you need to go and replace this device's battery and it takes this battery, like double a battery, CR123.
Speaker 3
Yeah. Well, and it also keeps track of when it was last replaced, too, right? So that's cool. Okay. Yeah. So like, yeah, it's a button. It actually resets a timer on the when it was last replaced. So it's kind of neat. That is
Speaker 2
actually, no, that's actually really handy because I would like to be able to tell, you know, what health is of those issues. Because as I mentioned before, like the front door sensor, like constantly going out of battery, I'd like to know what cadence I'm replacing that battery on. So I can at least then start planning, you know, okay, this battery is going to last me six months, I've only got this much left in stock. Let's make sure I've got, you know, I'm going to be due for one soon, right?
Speaker 3
Yeah. And you can also tie that to like an automation that goes back to grocery, right? To say, Hey, you know, subtract one and then add it on whatever, right? Like, so you've got the battery information you've you know, which type and so on, right? So it's yeah, it's a cool. Again, is it like you absolutely need to have this plugin? No, you're totally fine without it. Again, I've been running this my smart home for seven years now without it. And I just got it like a couple of weeks ago. But it's kind of cool. It's kind of handy.
Speaker 1
Yeah, I really like it just from the perspective of, you know, when I'm finally going to go replace it, especially some of the ones I have down in the basement on like the washer and machine in the dryer,
Speaker 3
I think, yeah,
Speaker 1
I don't want to walk all the way down there, grab the thing off of the device that it's on, bring it upstairs to investigate what battery it is, then replace it and then to go all the way back downstairs and put it back in. Now I can just go, okay, I'm going to go replace this one. I can look right on my phone and it's like, okay, it's a CR123, grab that, take it downstairs, replace it, then just bring the bad the old one up and you know, recycle it or whatever. So yeah, I love, I love having the knowledge of what kind of battery I'm working with, you know, without ever having to touch the device.
Speaker 2
Totally, totally. Well, you saw me all the leave links to that in the show nights, because I think that is going to be a staple in my smart home moving forward. Thank you mentioning that. There you
Speaker 1
go. So the other thing that I did, so I'm on the board of directors of our community pool. That's a thing in northern Virginia that they're everywhere. They're private clubs, you know, but they're open to whoever wants to join in the community. And what we've caught is a lot of young lifeguards who have to make, I'll say, you know, somewhat significant decisions on, you know, hey, was that thunder or lightning and should I close the pool or is it interesting? Yeah, and you know, it's up to these, you know, 16, 17, 18 year old kids and yeah, they do a great job. I'm not, I'm not trying to, you know, to, to drag him or anything. The problem that we run into is that we're close enough to Dulles International Airport, that on the wrong day with the wrong wind, you can actually hear the planes taking off. Like, if they're taking off to the north, we're south of the airport. So you get this nice, big, long rumble as they're moving down the runway. And I can't tell you how many times that we've closed for 45 minutes because they thought they heard thunder and it's a perfectly sunny day. And there's not a, not a single storm to be found for thousands of miles. So what I did was I took an old Raspberry Pi that I had sitting around my desk, which I obviously still have. And I put it in there and it's running just some basics. You know, like the weather, what's, you know, give me a radar picture. There's a lightning detector. It's what is it? Blitzortung or something like that. Obviously, I think it's German. And so it gives the amount of lightning strikes and the distance from your location. So that one's great because, you know, we can say, hey, look, if there's been a lightning strike within 25 miles shut down the pool and they can just walk over to the thing. And it's right there. We put it on a pretty cheap Android tablet and it's right there in the guard shack right next to the lifeguards. They just go, yep, absolutely. There's definitely one inside of 25 miles. We're shutting down the pool today. And then we added the air quality after the Canadian wildfires last year, we actually had to shut down the pool for a couple of days because we hit really bad levels. And we didn't want the left guard sitting out there for hours and hours on end. So I added that as kind of a way for the left guards to be able to prompt the board to say, hey, look, the air quality's gotten really bad. You know, what do you want us to do? Should we close or not? And then the fun sort of fun side project of all of that is working on music assistant to try and tie all of our sort of entertainment for the pool together and then provide just kind of one big single location where they can go and control all of that.

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