But every time I read an article like this, I can't help but think how cool I would feel if my house could tell I was coming and turned my lights on and my heat up, or dimmed and then turned everything off once I got in bed.
- ability to turn on house heat when we're headed home from a trip, or turn on the AC for the pets if there's a heat wave when we are traveling.
- ability to turn on the tea kettle when driving back home from an errand. Needs prior setup of course, and a switched outlet that can handle high current.
- ability to align porch light schedules with sunset/sunrise. I never have to think about it.
The "don't want to get up, i'll just do it from my phone" thing is nice, though, especially if you are stuck under a cat.
I also had only a few switches and the trade off was I could now dim them, at different times and different ways.
Tied it in with a Logitech Harmony Hub at the time for instant movie mode. I got a lot of use out of that little hub to not have to go full home automation.
Home Assistant is great though, it's much easier now, it will know you're coming via app and turn off everything. You can do the good night thing too.
Now my blinds automatically go up at 8.30, and close at sundown and I don't have to think about it - but my rooms are pleasantly exactly how o want them at all times.
What I'm most happy about is how I got them hardwired - I notched my cornice and slid an archetrave (narrow) light switch up into the cornice on a mounting block, caulked around it, and then ran a thin bit of surface conduit down to another slim junction box next to the blind. You can "see" that the power is there, but it blends nicely and means the blinds are powered off my lighting circuit - no batteries to worry about, and a shutoff in the room if I ever change out the motors.
Motor-wise I'm happy so far - the limits work, and it's been set and forget with Home Assistant driving them through ESPHome. Unfortunately the motor is a Realtak-based chip, not Beken, so no Tuya-cloudcutter exploit exists to get ESPHome on their wirelessly. If I was doing it again from scratch I'd try and find something easier to de-cloud. As it is since I know the motors fit and know how to open them up, we've got a bunch more we're planning to do since we have some really big windows we'd need multiple blinds to cover, and we just never considered it practical till we did this.
EDIT: Basically it's a home automation upgrade I've been incredibly happy with the outcome for, but man if Tuya would let go of the lock-in aspirations then it would become dead-easy to recommend to people.
Did you write/record anything online about the chip swapping, or can you recommend any resources?
Did you end up deciding on something easier to decloud for your future ones?
Thanks!
Every setting you do manually throughout a day or season can be automated.
Tie it in with movie mode to close everything, etc.
Luvolite and their rebranded partners is a decent bang for the buck: https://www.louvolite.com/
I hear Ikea is worth looking at too.
I do have two accordion blinds I raise and lower daily, but only two. One wall of my house is a giant sliding glass door with floor-length curtains, though, which are as manual as it gets. They don't even have a stick to guide them. I just grab an edge and pull. I don't think my landlord would appreciate it if I mount a whole different track, but I guess it might be different if he doesn't find out.
My heater is my biggest concern, though. It's a propane-fed floor unit (house is very small, as I mentioned). It's controlled by walking over and pushing buttons on the top of it. It has no remote. The thermostat is part of the unit itself. Turning power to the unit itself off and on would kill the pilot light, never mind that in the winter I can't have it go off. I just want it to go from 65 while I'm home down to 55 while I'm not. It only takes a couple minutes to warm the house (again, house is quite small), but the pipes would freeze if I let it get any colder.
And that's where I come back to, "How inconvenient is it, really, to open my curtains in the morning and turn the temp down when I walk out the door?" The heater is even adjacent to the door.
In other cases a room can't keep it's temperature stable and might need the blinds open or closed to help regulate the temperature.
I still use switches in some places in my apartment, but haven't had a need to touch my bathroom and kitchen light switches in a year. Once you start getting used to your automations, it really does feel like a level up to your home.
Though of course the fun/cool factor is a separate thing (:
The cool factor is maybe 25% of it for me. It's mainly an obsessive hobby.
And you're entirely right it's an unstoppable gateway to learning how to code arduino's and then esp32's, and then eventually hardware projects that aren't even smart home related.