34 karma · joined March 27, 2016
If I add new "stuff" I add it to home assistant, if I want to do things with my "stuff" I do it in nodered.
Also, if the "stuff" I want to add is a little sensor or arduino or esp8266, I can just have it send MQTT messages, and then all of a sudden without touching anything in home assistant, I have access all the way in nodered to use these messages to do anything I want.
I have also been very impressed with some of the infrastructure/solutions that the open source community has available, it is a pretty rich infrastructure that is not unbearably-brittle if you know what you are doing, but definitely is not user friendly enough to be easy to recommend to everyone.
1. Checking front/backdoor is locked every single night, now I have an automation that turns on the front hall light and sends my phone a notification that the door is unlocked.
2. The "did I close the garage thoughts", just being able to check your phone from the airport or wherever you are and see "yep its closed" is "nice" but not necessary of course
3. Everytime I open the garage door, the light turns on with a timer and some logic so that I never touch that light switch
4. auto turn off air purifier in bedroom in the morning (and on at night too)
5. Anytime the doorbell rings and I am not home, I get a phone notification with a picture of who is at the door. Helpful when worried about missing packages, deliveries, etc. Doesn't necessarily "help" solve the problem, but does do something mentally
6. Recently I added one that nudges the volume on the tv up a few clicks and down a few clicks based on the HVAC turning on/off, it was something I found myself doing habitually and now that it works it is extremely seamless and has been great
I have way more complicated scenarios of course, all of which I find compelling, but I really like the automations where you dont know they are doing something necessarily, your brain just forgets they are even automations.
Pretty clean source tree to reference :) Seems to be unique per OS and not dependent on third party projects.
RTLSDR https://www.amazon.com/RTL-SDR-Blog-RTL2832U-Software-Define...
Use it to pick up weather satellites with the included antenna. Can spend ~$100 more to get images from the GOES satellites. Can use it to listen to ham radio, and local repeaters. Can use it during SSTV events to get images from the ISS https://ariss-sstv.blogspot.com/
Another super interesting thing I have done with my RTL-SDR is track NOAA and Meteor weather satellites and decode the images in realtime as they fly by overhead