It’s hard to understate just how much of an impact Home Assistant has made on my smart home. It’s the dashboard to rule them all that the manufacturers could have made if they’d stop arguing about whether they should use Matter, or HomeKit, or whatever smart home protocols are the flavor of the month. It’s enabled me to ditch various smart device subscriptions, control (most) of my devices from one app, and give me a new inexhaustible source of ‘projects’ for when I’m bored.

But I also keep things pretty low-key. I don’t have many automations set up, preferring to use voice commands in the moment or the few things that I do have set on a schedule, like reminders for trash pickup day. I found automation to be more trouble than it was worth to set up, but all I was missing was the right set of events to trigger further action.

Many of these use smartphone geolocation as their main trigger, which means you’ll want to turn off the randomized MAC address feature on iOS and Android, otherwise, the automations will struggle to identify those devices.

Morning routine (weekdays only)

Wake up (wake up)

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Everyone has left the house

Time for the robots to get to work

Geofenced automations are awesome, but they take some time to set up. The biggest issues I’ve encountered are automations triggering when only one person has left the home, and automations not working because our smartphones have changed their MAC address and look like different devices to the system. Turning off randomized MAC is a quick fix, but the other takes some care in crafting automations so that they check to see if anyone else is at home before they trigger to turn off the lights, change the HVAC to a more eco-friendly temperature, and set the robovacs to cleaning.

I’ve found using GPS and Wi-Fi connectivity together gives the best chance of success when triggering automations based on smartphone location, and to do that, you need to enable the Wifi Connection sensor for each smartphone, and a little bit of code in HA’s configuration file for each phone:

- platform: template sensors: your_phone_name: value_template: >- {% if states('sensor.your_phone_name_wifi_connection') == "home_wifi" %} home {% else %} not_home {% endif %} friendly_name: 'Your Phone Name (SSID = home_wifi)'

Now the sensor is available as a trigger for automations, and it’s really handy not just for when people leave, but when they come back.

Someone is coming back to the house

Nobody wants to come back to a dark home

Using the same sensor as before, I have a few things automated to happen when we get home. Most of these are simple, like turning on the entrance hallway lights, and setting the HVAC to a suitable temperature based on the time of year. These have a double-trigger in that lighting only comes on if the sun is below the horizon, and there’s a check against the weather for that day to see whether the HVAC gets changed to heating or cooling.

Nighttime routine

Aka the “I’m not getting back up now I’m in bed” routine

I also have an automation that runs after our usual bedtime, with a few secondary triggers to make sure that neither of us are downstairs or working late. If Home Assistant doesn’t detect movement, it does one more check to see if our smartphones are plugged in to the smart plugs next to our bed, and then triggers a shutdown command that turns off all the lighting in the house, sets my PC to shut down as long as it’s not backing up at the time, and checks the state of the smart locks to ensure everything is locked up tight.

It’s midday and everyone is awake

I’m forgetful but my house can remember for me

During the day, I’ve got a few automations that make recurring tasks easier. One of these is triggered by motion sensed by my video doorbell, which then opens the feed on a display near my desk. I don’t want to have to find my phone and unlock it to get the same feed, but I still wish to have advance warning if a package is being delivered or someone is trying to sell something so I can ignore the doorbell.

I also have another automation that checks for any events on my calendar that aren’t set to my home address, and checks the weather report for that location. I then get a nice notification through Home Assistant that reminds me to pick up a coat on the way out, or to get an umbrella.

And some basic motion control settings

There aren’t many of these (yet)

Hands-free voice-activated lighting is one thing, but true hands-free motion-controlled smart lighting is one of the things that sounds great until you try to implement it. Anyone who has ever used a corporate washroom that has motion sensors for the lighting knows this one intimately, and there is nothing quite like the terror of the lights turning off when you’re in a Severance-slash-backrooms style washroom.

But for home use, I’m less worried about how long the light stays on and more concerned that I don’t have to use my hands to switch it on, and that it will turn back off (eventually) when I’m not there. A very simple automation in Home Assistant could look like this, and some of my hallway lights are set up to respond to Zigbee motion detectors:

triggers: - trigger: state entity_id: binary_sensor.your_motion_sensor_here # change this to: 'on' - trigger: state entity_id: binary_sensor.your_motion_sensor_here # change this to: 'off' for: minutes: 2 # adjust as necessary actions: - action: "light.turn_{{ trigger.to_state.state }}" target: entity_id: light.your_light_here # change this

Eventually, I want to do this for every closet in the house, plus the pantry, the cupboards in the bathrooms, and the network cabinet where the AC air handler and hot water tank also reside. I don’t want to fish around for the light switch every time; a small sensor fixes that. I don’t bother to complicate things here with a second trigger based on where the sun is in the sky, because these are the darkest spots in my home at any time of day, so I want the light even if it’s noon in the summer.

I don’t need complex automations for my smart home, I just need a few minutes saved here and there

My smart home is much better when I don’t overthink what it does, and every potential feature gets a grounded “but should we?” when I think about adding them to the mix. The last thing I want is to add to many things, which trigger all at once and cause the rest of my household to tell me to rip it all back out again. Just because the machines can do basic thinking doesn’t mean they have to do it all the time, and that’s a lesson I’ve repeatedly learned the hard way, whenever I picked up a new smart home platform.