Top 5 smart light automation ideas

Right up my alley! Lighting is my favourite

Another top place for motion sensor lights is in the kitchen - you're generally moving around, so with a sensible enough cooldown of two minutes or so, you rarely find yourself chopping vegetables in the dark. It's also a good place to use different scenes - no need for all the lights to come on at 100% brightness if you are only going to get a glass of water at 3am

if it is possible, can you please explain about AppDaemon and the HACS automation apps. in a Video

Wow! Love the fireplace idea 😎😎

PIR/Motion sensing is great for detecting movement as you mentioned, and clearly is flawed when you're sitting still... But it's superior over other forms of presence detection when on the move... But for turning off the lights in those areas like the livingroom and office, you want a sustained presence detection. ESPresence is the new kid on the block doing that part of things really well. A lot easier to setup than Room Assistant and the developer is working on a triangulation type of addon to it that lets you map out rooms that don't have a device in them. That's a future project for me. But you use motion sensors to turn on lights and then ESPresence to determine when the room is vacant to turn them off.

Also, for what it's worth red lighting is better for nightlights as it doesn't interfere with your nightvision, it doesn't travel as far to disturb others and you can still see very well. You might already know that and was showing white lights for the video, but I figured it was worth a mention.

Otherwise you've done a really good job here and in the other 3 videos I've just watched. I just found your channel and already learned a new thing that I just implemented thanks to your videos... creating scenes in scripts and automations! Gods that's gonna be a game changer for me. Thanks a billion times for that nugget!

motion activated lights best ideas = don't use it :)

Hi, I read that the aqara motion sensor has 1 minute long sleep intervals ... did you have any issues with that? On the videos it looks that the sensors react quick every time. Thanks.

In rooms like the office i check if a computer or tv screen is on, in which the lights dont turn off. This way when i walk in the room the lights turn on but stay on as long as the pc and tv are on. The next step would be to use deepstack and frigate to recognize who is in the room and base automations on that. the problem with this though is the fact that face recognition isnt realtime and home assistant cant follow a person. atleast not with these integrations. I want to use the camera in our living room to track people. and lets say for example when me and my girlfriend go sit on the couch the film starts playing again and when me or my girl walks to the kitchen the film automatically pauses and the lights go brighter. the last thing i did manage to do but the recognition is pretty hard to do.

So cool! I actually set up 1, 2, and 3 almost exactly the same, and have build my own smart fairy lights for dim bed lighting and room ambiance!

How do you power the LED strips on the stairs and under bed?

How did I have no awareness of Twinkly

Nice explained home assistant automations. The best would be to have as well a space in internet with a short how to step by step configuration for this automations.

Could you make a video to show how to integrate lights effect based on music; I'm interested to set the lights to react to sounds. Thx

Hi there, great video as always. :) Please can you tell me the namemof the LED strip that you have used for your stairs? Many thanks

Wondering if you can help with automating lights based on this logic:
1. If motion detected turn on lights
2. Wait 30 seconds
3. Turn off lights if occupancy is off else wait for occupancy to be off then wait for another 30 seconds to turn off lights.

Basically I have the new P1 sensors and i have set it to check for motion every 2 seconds and so it sets occupancy to off after 5 seconds of no motion.

There's a very reliable presence indicator in the office - your computer. You're probably not there if it's locked, so - short timeout. If it's unlocked - you're working, so - no timeout. Easily automated in Windows (via event viewer) and Linux.

It makes sense to play with a radar (rcwl-0516) for other rooms where you spend considerable time (they are cheap nowadays).

Presence detection is great but what if you have family members without a mobile phone? Or, what if you have kids that shouldn't have access to HA?

What burning wood is bad for the environment? When where you taught that?

bro use a webcam on your pc to trigger a doods person object that sets your room presence when the motion is triggered. Could do this without motion detectors too if you dont mind the doods constantly snapshotting. This way the lights will stay on when the input text entity is set by the room presence automation until that changes to a different room that you go into.

Fade in lights using transition doesn't work i.e transition doesn't work at all, i tried a lot gave up , any suggestions ?

Thanks for this. I have been running HA for years and never thought of implementing light transition for my wake up routine. I only had set 2 lighting states/brightness with a timer. I Have implemented this via node red and it is way cooler and less harsh on the eyes. I might implemented the bed one as well. You can never have too much RGB

Hello home automation guy, thanks for a great video. i have an issue with my motion sensor routine in the bathroom. My philips hue motion sensor triggers my smartlife light switch to turn on the lights in amazon routine. It's set for 15min with zero delay between running the next routine. However, if you stay longer than 15min in the bathroom, even if you walk pass the sensor it does not extend the "on" period. Once the lights switches off, it refuses to turn on again immediately & when it does turn on, it doesn't stay on for the full 15 min. Any idea how to fix this super annoying routine fail?. Thanks Ian

Nice ideas. I'm quite new to home automation so I'm doing a bit of binge watching.

Any tips on getting accurate home/away reports from android phones as mine can take quite a while to update, sometimes I can go out to the shops and get back before it realises that I'm gone.

I use the motion/presence sensors in a similar way. I use the PIR sensors to trigger occupancy and the couple of mmWave sensors to sense presence in the living room and bedroom. I much prefer the Tuya ZY-M100 as I can switch the distance so that during sleep time it only triggers when I get out of bed and puts a night light on, but if I'm in bed reading or watching TV I have it set further. This lets me put the PIR to better cover the door and trigger when I enter rather than trying to cover the entire room.

The other brick of a presence sensor isn't as useful as it has less control to fine tune its results and only gives a boolean value - but it seems good enough for detecting someone sitting and reading/watching the TV in the living room.

I have one motion sensor that can cover the landing, stairs and front door so can turn on the landing and hallway light when triggered. As these are transit areas I turn the sensor off if there hasn't been movement in 30 second.

The bathroom is the problem area at the moment. The shower screen blocks the PIR and if I position it so that the shower is covered, the door gets blocked so I am probably going to add a second PIR (no plugs for the presence sensor) to cover the blind spot - then work out the logic to control the light with the pair of them. I have a delay on switching off the light as- well, but I'm rarely sitting and reading and there's usually enough movement to set off the PIR without ending up in the dark for most other uses.

At the minute I'm playing with the adaptive lighting on some of the lights so that if I get up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet I don't have a bright light waking me up. It also dims the light and changes the light temperature towards the end of the day so that my natural biorhythms kick in helping me get to sleep.

And of course there's the pulsating red daemons that reside on top of the wardrobe - red pulsations provided by an RGB strip light and a node red control to gradually raise nd dim the brightness. Daemons courtesy of various ethnic wooden masks I collect.

Nice video great idea for my new home. What items do I need to buy to make this happen like light switch, monitor sensors. Could you help with equipment

Sensor motion has no sense. What if you sit or something for 5 seconds in the middle of the stairs. Or may be just stand for a while when you speak with someone... motion sensor are absolutely useless. With the new human sensor... i cant find a practical use for this.
Your example is perfect. A smooth light when you go to bathroom.
I am watching all your vids. Automate home is not expensive and it is really cool.

Do you use Home Assistant Cloud, or do you have HA exposed? If you have HA exposed, what steps have you taken to secure it? I have Wireguard setup on my router, but I don't have a way to automatically toggle the VPN on the devices when people leave, and manual toggle never gets used.

Thanks that video enlightened me :D

Hi, I’m hoping you can help me. I have two garage doors. The garage is adjacent to the kitchen through a door. There is also a man door in the rear of the garage that we let the dogs out into the back yard. So to let the dogs out we pass them into the garage then out the back door. In warm weather I’d like to keep one or both garage doors open for periods of time. I need a way to alert others in the home to NOT let the dogs through the connecting door (kitchen to garage) while the garage door(s) is open. I purchased a unit that I thought would work; had two wireless contacts that transmitted to a remote receiver mounted in the kitchen. It was ineffective because the light indicator only flashed for a few seconds. It would have been the solution if the indicator light in the kitchen remained on continuously until the door was closed. Depending on the electrical draw, the wireless receiver with a light would probably need to be plugged in instead of battery operated. I hope you know of an off the shelf item or items that will work together to accomplish this. Thank you in advance.

Nice Video's! ❤

Did you start using Human Presence Sensors in rooms where you're likely to reside longer rather than just pass through, and how did you implement it? For just turning off stuff or also for turning on?
Even better if you yourself or if you know others who use mmWave or other type of sensors for determining Direction of Motion, for turning on stuff before you arrive in a room..

i wast a light to always be rgb and when i enters the room iy change to white is this hard what do i need to buy?