Girlfriend-Approved Automation
Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi in a closet, running the lights, the heating and the doorbell. A private project to make the apartment a bit smarter, with one rule: my girlfriend should never have to think about it.
- Client
- My apartment
- Engagement
- Ongoing, unpaid, occasionally questioned
- Role
- Weekends
- Year
- 2024 to present
- Stack
- Home Assistant, ZHA, YAML, Raspberry Pi
- devices, all local
- 36Zigbee over ZHA, plus a few Wi-Fi devices that did not want to cooperate. Everything runs locally, so the lights still work when the internet is down.
- automations my girlfriend wants removed
- 0A few of them needed some tweaking first. The hallway light used to switch off while she was still standing in the hallway.
- party cube
- 1An Aqara Magic Cube that controls Spotify. Double tap to skip, shake to pause, turn it to change the volume. When friends are over everybody wants to try it, so far my most popular automation.
Same rules as at work, only without stakeholders. Everything runs locally, so nothing breaks when a vendor shuts down a service, and I keep the automations simple enough that I can still explain what happened when a light goes on by itself. Lights react to presence, the heating follows our calendar, and the switch on the wall always wins.
That last part matters more than it sounds. If something only works with the right app on the right phone, nobody else in the apartment will use it. So every device can still be used the normal way, and guests do not need an explanation.