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> Overall, I consider "smart home" to be a fairly expensive and time-consuming hobby that saves me maybe 10 min per day

Fair point, but does it really need to save time for you? For me it's more of a convenience thing. I recently bought a new house, and I didn't immediately have the time to install my smart devices (Nest, Hue lights, motion sensors etc). After just a couple of days I was already getting fed up with having to get up to "manually" flip switches, change the temprature, rolling down the blinds etc.

Omg yes. I had an Ecobee in my previous hone and thought it was just kinda okay. 3 weeks ago I moved into a new place that has a traditional thermostat and I’m now aware of how much better that Ecobee was.

We're aiming at the same thing, I just quantify convenience by the amount of time saved per action.

For example, leaving my home is about 20 seconds faster (no need to turn everything off manually and reach the switch to turn the lights on/off in the hallway when putting on shoes).

> change the temprature

How much are people actually changing the temperature? I have a temp for the furnace (68F), and a temp for the A/C (73F). I almost never adjust it.

I have mine turning down every night to save energy

You don't need a "smart home" for this. I have a decades old thermostat that can be programmed to turn down at night.

It depends on many factors: size of the house and where you spend most of your time. It sounds like you may live in a relatively small space.

Almost no home heats completely evenly and you will have some rooms that are warmer than others, especially when the air is on. (Good HVAC setup can mitigate some but not all).

So for example, I live in a 4,000 sqft home, and the kitchen is far and away the hottest room in the house, especially when it is in use. So when I have guests over I will tend to turn the overall heat down, and leave the gas logs on in the den to keep guests cozy while I cook.

Just an example, but I am sure there are many situations like it out there.

My thermostat is on an exterior wall, so the reading is affected by the outdoor temperature. I need to adjust it every few weeks as it gets colder so it doesn't turn my house into a sauna in the winter time. Obviously this is not ideal, but count this story as one more anecdotal example that some people change their thermostat frequently.

If anything, this is a reason why you need multiple temperature sensors.

Temperature is a huge factor influencing sleep cycle for some people, myself included. I sleep and wake much better if physical temperature and light color temperature adjust in time with my schedule, which isn't always uniform so rigidly programmable thermostats don't quite do the job.

> How much are people actually changing the temperature?

In some cases, a fair bit.

On the other hand and friend and I did a back of the envelope calculation and worked out he could manually change the temperature in his house for about 100 years and still spend less time than he had already spent working on his somewhat homebrew solution (this was a while ago).

Arguably the convenience is not the labour involved in turning a dial, but the burden of remembering to?

That's true - will depend a lot on usage. Also scriptability is very different than interactive use.

Seriously. I set the times and temperatures in my thermostat when I bought this house in the late 90s. I tweaked them a bit over the next few months and have not changed them in over 20 years.

This is so true.

When you get used to something being either fully automated, like hallway lights turning off and on automatically or easily voice controlled, like enabling movie mode via Alexa (Dim lights, turn on TV and media devices) it's really hard to go back to the old way of running around pushing switches.

I am in the same situation as you. I also have a tolerant wife that "understands" that the lights are available 90% of the time (but when they are, it is magic).

Have you considered AppDaemon for automations? https://appdaemon.readthedocs.io

I tried to use the YAML based solutions but YAML is not done for that and anything more complicated is not doable (or at least without a super-complex code) - this is usually a few line sin Python in AD.

I would love to be able to use the presence automations but my wife ad children, for reasons that are beyond my understanding, sometimes switch off the wifi to use their data plan. The GPS tracking was draining the battery too much last time I tried (but I have to try again).

Alternatively Homeassistant also offers an integration for Node Red, which feels a bit odd to work with at first but I learned to love it more and more. I never really bothered to learn Homeassistants YAML automation syntax.

https://nodered.org/

I wish NodeRed had a YAML (or whatever) syntax though, something git-friendly; that it was a viewer/editor for a sane human-readable text format.

(As I recall, it's JSON with lots of long numeric IDs for each node, semantic data also mixed with presentational - coordinates for how you laid it out in the visual editor, etc.)

Yes, this is also why I got rid of it when giving a try. This is not maintainable outside of the GUI

NodeRED keeps its stuff in a single directory, which can be backed up easily. Also the state can be fully restored with just the contents of that directory.

It's not git-friendly though, no easy way of versioning stuff really.

If you enable Node-RED "Projects" [0], you not only get git-friendly flow configs, but can have them automatically push to remote repos.

[0]: https://nodered.org/docs/user-guide/projects/

You got me excited for a second, but that seems just to be a UI for people that don't know what 'a git' is, and `commit -a`-ing of changes, in the same non-'git-friendly sane human-readable plaintext format' I was complaining about.

I know what git is, so I can already `git commit -a -m 'Updated nodes'` if that's what I wanted, but it isn't, I want logical diffs that show me what I did and why; not spurious ID changes because I accidentally moved a node visually a millimetre or two.

It does give you a better diff option, actually. :) It may not meet your needs, but it will show you a diff between commits that is more context-aware for Node-RED.

I can't come up with any automations related to my home that are difficult to do in YAML.

I'm more interested in getting rid of IFTTT/Zapier/way-too-messy-Python-scripts, but that'll probably wait until winter holidays.

My typical automation that is cumbersome with YAML is with RF433 switches. I have plenty of wall switches (say - 20) that emit a signal AAAAAABBBBBB, I am only interested in the BBBBB part, and then I need to match this with an action.

Sometimes (usually) this is a toggle, sometimes a on, sometimes an off, sometimes something else.

This is easy to do in Python (the list if kept as a dict with actions, there are three lines, one for each action), but gets very verbose with YAML.

Could you use the combination of wifi and GPS. If the device leaves wifi, check GPS in 5 minutes.

There's also PyScript, a custom component that allows you to write automations in Python. The docs have a bunch of nice examples that give you an idea how it looks.

https://github.com/custom-components/pyscript https://hacs-pyscript.readthedocs.io/en/stable/tutorial.html...

Excellent timing, thanks! I am looking at possibly replacing AppDaemon as we speak.

This is a great software, bit it is really distinct from HA and simple automations require quite a bit of code anyway.

I was thinking about having a mixed mode: the very simple automations (covers up at 9:00) would go into the YAML and more complicated would use the Python scripting described here: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/python_script/ (also from automations, but the real work would be done in the script)

Now I see with your comment that there is a HACS component as well - have you compared both and chose one of them for some specific reason?

OK, following up on my last comment - pyscript is teh way to go. One can import anything and the functions are very light, decorated etc.

It looks like a very good solution for more complicated automation (and for simple ones as well, it is just two lines)

Exactly, that's what I like about pyscript: it is a great alternative for simple YAML automations, but it also allows for complex logic that would be impossible or very cumbersome with YAML.

Some of the rabbit holes you described reminded me of a joke surfaced on some Russian forums long ago.

The re was a screenshot of a game running in DosBox in an XP running in VMWare running in Linux running in Virtualbox(?) running on Windows.

The complaint was, there was no sound coming from the game :)

I have a friend who a few months wanted to automate/remote control a water pump at his cabin and monitor his solar system and batteries. He has internet connectivity there but otherwise is off the grid. So I thought okay, raspberry pi, arduino with an Ethernet shield and some extra electronics, and then use dataplicity to remote connect. It's not straightforward with his internet setup to initiate a connection from the outside world. But he wasn't crazy about controlling the thing with a command line and really wanted a web interface. After some searching around I ended up using Home Assistant. We are still putting it all together but it's been very nice so far, like battery voltage graphs and sending/receiving data via MQTT is really pretty easy.

> I also have an NFC tag next to my door. If I hover my phone over it when I leave the house, it shuts off my TV and any lights that are turned on.

I do this with a small switch from Aqara ( https://www.aqara.com/en/smart_wireless_mini_switch.html ) next to the door. Single click turns everything off, double click turn everything off and starts the Vacuum cleaner.

I just say "Alexa, goodbye" and stuff turns off + Alexa enters Guard Mode.

I used the Alexa media player integration along with the integration for my alarm panel, so Home Assistant automatically synchronizes Alexa's Guard Mode with the alarm being armed or disarmed.

What kettle/device are you using that boils when the power comes on without having to press a button manually? Every single kettle I've looked at requires pressing a button to start a boil "for safety".