I have an announcement play every 30 minutes to yell at me in a harsh voice “Drink Water God Damn It!” I forget to hydrate a lot. I’ve tried many other reminders, but none of them worked well. Turns out I just need someone to yell at me.
Laziest eh? Probably the one that deletes completed items from my shopping list when I leave the supermarket, because I got sick of doing it manually.
Most ridiculous would be the NFC tag I have on the lid of my cold brew coffee jug. I make a batch so rarely that I can never remember how much coffee to add, so scanning the tag makes my Google Home say; “You want 80g of coffee per litre, or 6 scoops.”
Mostly the ones that send a post from one social media app to another.
@spaghettiwestern The two that made me dive into the home assistant rabbit hole:
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When the rabbits are out around sunset (door sensor on their cage) lights turn red and my and my wife’s phone get a notification. Too many times we remembered that the rabbits were loose while it was pitch black. Not too good with black rabbits…
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Fixing the mess that is my Marantz receiver, communicating with my TV over hdmi and lately my wiim streamer. Turn it on and off depending on need, controlling zone 2 as well as turning on power for the zone 2 amplifier when it’s used in the receiver. The ridiculous part here is that it’s necessary - these things should just work!
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I have alerts that push out when the fridge door is open.
And another that flashes all the lights in the house when the doorbell rings.Not sure this belongs, but my most proud automation is an automatic water bowl for my dogs. It automatically drains, rinses, and fills 16 times per day so they always have fresh water. They deserve a better life than my lazy ass can give them.
:O it’s hooked to the tap and a drain I assume? How big is that?
“Good night” turns off all the lights in the house. I guess it’s silly/lazy because at midnight all the lights turn off anyway.
“It’s dark in here” sets a scene where all the lights in our living room are set to bright white.
Thought of another one…
I bought some TP-Link wifi bulbs that were flaky from the start. After some investigation I discovered that these particular bulbs felt it important to phone home to China every few seconds and became very, very unhappy if the lines were down. After a short tantrum they would reset their wifi connection before regaining consciousness. What that meant in my 3 bulb fixture was that when my “lights off” scene was triggered and my firewall was blocking their corporate masters, one or more of the bulbs was often in a stupor and would remain on indefinitely.
Did I just go spend $25 on some new, decent bulbs that actually worked? Nope - no way some stinking TP-Link bulbs were going to win! Instead I spent hours creating multiple redundant automations that checked for each possible failure state, kept polling the bulbs until their tantrum ended and they regained consciousness, and then turned off whatever bulbs were left on.
Every time I turned off the lights I was able to declare victory. After I felt they had learned their lesson I bought some Zigbee bulbs that actually work.
You’re my spirit animal.
I’ve got a led strip on my toilet door. It turns red when someone is inside (mesured by the wasp in a box principle.
I’m unfamiliar with the wasp in a box principle. Is that the one where you keep a box of live wasps in the bathroom and determine if someone is in there based on how recently you’ve heard a scream?
Where do you guys find power outlets for all these weird placements of LED strips? :D Outlets in my house is not in great places for something like this.
Suggestion for enhancement: Have the LEDs start out yellow and after a couple of minutes turn them red because entry has likely become hazardous.
Or put a mic in the bathroom and make the LEDs yellow for pee sounds and red for fart sounds.
I’m kidding but I actually think this would be fun, but you’d need a way to differentiate sounds.
44 automations + 27 scripts and counting, not sure any of them are totally over the top but theres at least 2 dedicated buttons in my house for when the dog needs to take a shit in the middle of the night to turn on specific lights for a short time for him.
Unfortunately I haven’t taught him to use them on his own.
44 automations? HA!
I have a small home and currently have over 200 automations. Maybe I need to find other hobbies.
600+ automations, 500+ scripts :( My house runs itself, and has its own moods. If it’s in a goth persona and feeling miserable (which it usually is when in a goth persona), it’ll change some of the light colors to apocalypse of blood.
You win!
Curious as to what you’re using scripts for? I have 88 automations and have so far found no need for a single script and I feel like I’m missing a trick somewhere.
Yes, I do have some automations that share functionality but it’s one or two actions and it seems redundant to call a separate script.
Scripts are used for a lot of things! Generally any time I want to do the same thing under multiple automations, I use a script as the middleman.
For example, I built a script for turning off all of my lights each night but it has to be fed a time scaling variable to determine specifically how quickly to turn them off (sometimes I want them turned off quickly vs slowly). Automations trigger said script with the right scale factor.
I have air purifiers that I ramp up and down conditionally, they don’t have a built in ramping function so I built a script to ramp them to a target % in their allowed 10% increments, over a variable time period. This can be then be called in one line from any automation or script.
When I’m turning off lights each night, I want them to ramp down to a specific level/color/temperature before turning off but only if they are currently on. Rather than build an if statement for every light, a script takes a input list of lights and runs through each one to determine whether or not to ramp.
Finally, my Google Home device is able to call scripts directly, (“hey Google, activate Cozy Time” triggers the “Cozy Time” script) so some things I use Google Assistant to trigger use scripts directly since that was at least easier at the time than using an automation. If I automate the same thing (e.g., a “Cozy Time” button above), I can just call the script from the automation in one line, easy peasy.
Yet.
@spaghettiwestern I get notified whenever my favorite coffee brand price changes in the supermarket… ☕😎
I replaced my fridge light with an RGB zwave light and door sensor. This concept has been solved for decades and my solution is worse. But it also turns green…
I got a new fridge last year and the whole back of it (behind the shelves) is lit evenly, I guess with LEDs. Far nicer than a bulb.
Oh that’s interesting! What bulb did you use?
I click a button when taking my pill so I don’t take it twice by mistake, it also alerts me if I’ve forgotten my dose. Not really ridiculous, but I wanted to feel included lol
I need this. Can you share?
frog I can’t even remember to get my meds renewed let alone take them half the time. 30 days of pills last me upwards of 3 months before I get a new bottle. no wonder I’m so messed up
MedTimer (FOSS) and a 7-day pill organizer changed my life.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve had to upgrade to one with AM/PM distinctions to balance the uppers and downers.
Also, you have ADHD. Talk to somebody about it.
That’s genuinely useful.
this isn’t bad!!!1one
Easily the most ridiculous is the one I made on a motion trigger from the camera pointed out my window to take a snapshot, pass it to ollama/qwen3, and have it compose a haiku about the scene to be read aloud by Pocket TTS.
