I have lots of favorite things with my system… and it’s always changing… always!
In no particular order…
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Foyer and Porch lights - When the front door opens (24 hours per day) the foyer lights turn on. If the door closes then the lights will go off in 3 minutes. If the door does not close (we leave it open for natural lighting) then the lights go off in 5 minutes. At 20 minutes before sunset the porch lights come on, they turn off at 9 pm. Between the hours of 9 pm and sunrise, if the front door opens then the foyer lights come on and the porch lights come on. Also, between those hours if a presence sensor arrives home, then the porch lights (not the foyer lights) come on.
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Coming home from the store - Our phones use Life360 as our location app. This integrated with IFTTT and ST allows me to have predetermined places. The phone knows when we arrive at these places… (Winn-dixie, Wal-Mart, Publix, Sam’s Club… All places that we would normally bring home lots of stuff). When we leave those places Life360 alerts IFTTT which then tells ST to turn on the “Grocery Shopping” virtual switch. When we arrive home and that switch is on, then the garage door opens, the kitchen lights turn on, the kids alert lights, and their speakers tell them we are home with groceries and to come to the garage to help carry it in. FYI - I do not have to use IFTTT for this automation. I use it as a second level of security. The phone has to tell IFTTT and IFTTT has to tell ST and then the phones have to come home. ST presence is flaky at best. If I didn’t use the virtual switch and IFTTT, then my garage door would be opening up all of the time.
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Announcements - Using AskAlexa and CoRE I can do things like this…
Alexa, tell home to announce dinner time.
Alexa, tell home to tell the boys to go to bed.
Alexa, tell home to ask the boys to bring down their dirty clothes and hangers.
Alexa, ask home to tell me the last time Dug was fed
Alexa, ask home to tell me the last time the litter box was cleaned
… and the list goes on.
With each command Alexa triggers a CoRE Piston which in turn launches actions and sends Text To Speech to speaker through out the house. I have custom things for each of the kids and each of the kids rooms. So I can tell Alex one thing and Justin something else. -
My master bathroom - My wife likes bright lights… I hate bright lights. So, you can imagine the dilemma we have in our master bath. So, I created lighting schemes that are mode dependent and action dependent. The entire automation for the room is on three levels.
Level 1 - Master Bath - Modes - motion sensors trigger the lights in the room and different ones come on at different levels for each mode. Morning 20%, Day 100%, Eve - 75%, Night/Late Night - 40%, Sleep - one bulb at 5%.
Level 2 - Master Bath - Jason’s lights - Using the motion sensor in the shower my level overrides and turns off level one, but only in certain modes. So, I walk in the room and the lights are triggered by level one. When I get in the shower, the lights slowly dim down to very very low… one bulb at 2%. A couple of minute later the fans turn on. When I get out, once the motion sensor reports no action then the system resets and goes back to level one automations.
Level 3 - Master Bath - Wendi’s lights - She always has her cabinet door open and she insist on all of the lights being on at a billion percent. So, I put a contact sensor on her cabinet door that overrides and turns off levels 1 & 2. It turns on all of the lights and leaves it that way until her cabinet door closes. It also turns on her hair accessories located beneath the cabinet. I told her the curling Iron is NOT on the system so she has to turn it off manually… though she sometimes forgets… so I put it on a plug in module just in case she forgets. She closes the cabinet and they all go off.
What really neat about this one is that in the beginning I found that as level 2 or 3 ended I either had to stand still for 30 seconds or stand there in the dark. The lights did not automatically just restart in the mode that they were in before the higher levels were turned on. So, using CoRE, in the Level 2 & 3 pistons at the end of the shut down section I have the system execute the piston that controls the mode lighting for the room. So, the levels shut down and the mode piston is re-initiated. Since I do NOT use motion sensing as a trigger, only a condition, when the piston is executed it is found to be true and resets the lights. Then when I leave the room every thing shuts down as programmed.
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And finally… The TV… My baby is now 10 months old and it took me that long to finally buy the harmony hub. I bought it once before but returned it… don’t ask why… cause I’m a moron. Anyway… I don’t do a lot with it yet, but I just got it a few days ago. Right now I can just say, Alexa, tell home to watch TV/Netflix/Movies and she turns things off and on. I got it simply because it never fails I’ll want to turn on the TV just as Moira falls asleep in my arms and the remote is on the other side of the room… next to the TV.
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and finally… my still a work in progress… My Smart Home User Manual!!! I haven’t had time to update it lately… but it’s being worked on… follow this link…