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Comment by _dain_ | Hacker News Reader

>There's no reason to have the hallway or bathroom lights on all the time, just have them turn on with motion and turn off X minutes after no motion is detected.

goes dark when you're taking a long shit. so you have to get up and wave your hands with your trousers down and asshole covered in shit, like a psychotic

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I thought the same thing, but if we're talking about building our own smart home, I assume the solution for that would be relatively simple?

For instance, add a pressure sensor under the bathmat (or seat) in front of the toilet so that the turn-off timer doesn't run while it senses pressure. Alternatively, maybe infrared heat sensor or CO2 sensor to detect presence of living mammals in the room. But both of these approaches can be messed up by your cat/dog spending all day/night laying on the bathroom mat keeping the lights on.

The cool thing about building your own smart home is you can design system to do anything on any kind of assumption. The bad part is you're turning your home into an test of your engineering design prowess, and most part-time novices aren't going to be super happy with how they score... especially if their score ends up being an input to their home valuation.

>relatively simple

>pressure sensor, infrared heat sensor, CO2 sensor

we have very different definitions of "simple". and they need extra work to account for other use-cases (I cringe to use this term), such as lying motionless in a nice, relaxing bath.

a light switch on a cord works every single time, needs no maintenance, no firmware updates, the CCP can't spy on you through it, and you can make it look nice by hanging a decorative weight on the end.

a real "smart bathroom" shouldn't be about wallace and gromit gadgetry, it should be about making the experience more hygienic and dignified. such as: a bidet, rather than toilet paper.

My "relatively" qualifier does a lot of work... relative to projects like rebuilding transmissions or doing hobby robotics, I think adding a few bluetooth/wifi enabled sensors and a bit of logic to toggle a light is pretty simple.

And yeah, that's what I mean by doing your own design engineering... are you actually going to solve for that "once in a year" case? Or do you just use a switch to toggle to "normal mode" for when you want to take that long bath?

I don't have any kind of platonic ideal for what a "smart bathroom" might be, I just like thinking through the design/engineering possibilities.

> For instance, add a pressure sensor under the bathmat (or seat) in front of the toilet so that the turn-off timer doesn't run while it senses pressure. Alternatively, maybe infrared heat sensor or CO2 sensor to detect presence of living mammals in the room. But both of these approaches can be messed up by your cat/dog spending all day/night laying on the bathroom mat keeping the lights on.

Instead of ripping up your floor or adding weird heat and CO2 sensors, you could just buy a dual-tech (PIR and ultrasound) wall switch occupancy sensor to replace the PIR occ sensor. This problem has been solved already.

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Lutron-Maestro-Dual-Tech-Motion-...

The solution is to have motion control an ambient light in the bathroom but not the main light. Use a (smart) switch to control the main light and use it when you're going to be there a while. Set up the system not to turn off the ambient light when the main light is on, no matter how much time passes.

This way you get the convenience of hands-free when you're just washing your hands or something, but you have all the light you want--for a bubble bath--or whatever.

There is still the problem of sometimes forgetting to turn the switch off, but since it's smart, it's easy for Siri to turn it off when you go to bed, etc.

> goes dark when you're taking a long shit. so you have to get up and wave your hands with your trousers down and asshole covered in shit, like a psychotic

This is hilarious to me. I am currently taking a long shit lit only by my laptop's screen.

Also, I have fortunately long mastered the art of wiping my butt without looking.

This created a wonderful image in my head. Thanks for that. I take famously long shits too, and this would be a deal breaker for me. I guess a smart toilet would solve this. Wouldn’t even need to be that smart: “someone’s there: keep the lights on”. Like the seatbelt light in my car.

it's happened to me in public toilets. at least the motion sensor detects movement inside the cubicle so you don't have to open the door, but I shouldn't say more in case I give the devil more ideas.

Just time your longest shit, add 5 minutes and put that in the timer.

If it takes longer than that, consult your doctor. =)

my experience is that you set the timer to take longer to go off in particular rooms to get around this problem, and that waving a single arm - while irritating - is sufficient.

How about waving your arm once to turn on a light switch and then wave it again to turn it off?

Kind of like moving a wall switch up once, and then down once?

Yes that was the idea. :)

then you are back to having a light switch that you might absentmindedly forget to turn off costing money.

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