I Create Better Automations Using These Hidden Principles 

Im glad it made sense! Automations are so open-ended and it's easy to get carried away! I know at the beginning of my smarthome exploration, thinking that a fully automated (seamless) experience would be the best. And in theory, it sounds nice and would be ideal but life isn't predictable enough for us to do that. These principle are to help people think beyond the flashiness of an idea and focus on the practical user experience. 😁

Wow, thank you! Im waiting for the channel to explode but until then im enjoying the journey 😁

+1

I have over 70 smart devices in my home with just ONE Hub and some Apple Devices that just happen to serve as hubs. The ONLY reason I have Homebridge is for the Eufy Security plugin, and that’s because HK doesn’t support 4K cameras yet. HA and HB will soon be irrelevant once Thread/Matter is more widely adopted and improved with time. HA HB will soon be an afterthought and an added complication to Home Networks. The whole point of Thread/Matter is to rid ourselves of multiple hubs and having 24/7 servers running for automations.

What do you currently use to create your automations?

@@technithusiast I slowly phased out Google and Alexa devices and replaced them with HomePods. The Smart Switches/Outlets/Lights/Air Purifiers/Motion Sensors are all Thread/Matter compatible and I only use the Home App for Automations. I have several complex automations that work just fine without additional hubs. My whole objective was to rid myself of having multiple platforms/hubs and since me and my family have Apple Mobile devices, it was a no-brainer to switch to an Apple-Centric smart home environment. Everything seems to work great and response times are almost non-existent with this set up.

Yoooooo I’m stoked for you! I’m glad my videos provide a bit of value for you :) if you would like more ideas, check out technithusiast.com/and-enthusiastic-newseletter and I’ll send you emails about automation ideas and interesting tech :)

LOL very true! This automation was rushed so i didn't go into great detail but this should be configured for your situation. I actually had a different trigger that would have been perfect Apple Homekit is limited so i had to abandon the idea 😞

Really well said!! i find the highest praise is the spouse/family members who actually use the automations. As cool as automations are, they have to be just as reliable as their dumb counterpart.

I think it comes down to two main components. One of them is obviously the interaction component. But the other one is probably even more important: event recognition. I think this is where the bayesian binary sensor platform will be helpful to estimate the probability of the occurence of an event by evaluating a series of other events and/or sensor states.

I like your approach. If you haven’t seen this video, you may like this: - Best way to use your Todo List in Home Assistant ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-5NCEeHtskcs.html - Make Your Own Innovative Smart-Home Secretary ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-H38JbIAwQaE.html - A long range sensor for home assistant! ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-UcKt4cvlsUI.html The three vids above are variations of how your smart-home can inform you of events for various use cases like telling you about your schedules or informing you about mail. Utilizing AI will allow the smarthome to determine intent easier and shift the home to a more proactive state

Really glad you enjoyed the video!

Thank you and Im glad to hear you enjoyed this video! You should definitely check out the other videos! For example this video was a really dramatic video how my smart home failed me during an attempted break-in: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-chmMDTNvsEg.html

I completely agree. The permission based model provides control at the risk of being a little annoying. The BIGGEST issue I’ve had with this is that depending on the ecosystem, (I use Google home) the devices don’t allow you to ask questions back 😭there are so many dope automations I would create if I had just that one feature!!!!

@@technithusiast I once had it working with Alexa and sonos via home assistant, but it was finnicky at best. Looking forward to the collaboration between nvidia and nabu casa on the "local Ai box", so we can get stuff like this working reliably.

This somewhat relates to a comment I posted a few minutes ago. But I would rather turn it around, so for example when I'm about to watch a movie but forgot to adjust the lights, I want HA to ask me something. (Like "it seems that you're about to watch a movie but [whatever differences from Cinema scene]. Do you want me to activate the Cinema scene?") I don't want these questions every time I'm just watching TV on a regular day (about 95% of the days) but I do want HA to assist me in creating the right scene when I'm about to watch a movie.

@@Sierra-Whisky that's why I mentioned the "de bouncer". Basically you just remember the answer and don't ask again for x-hours. That way you can flexibly toggle behavior in your house.

I’m glad you noticed! I wanted to bring a little bit of software engineering and ux design patterns to the space. Everyone wants high WAF scores but it’s sometime hard to see the parameters a play that influences usability.

Im in a similar boat my wife doesn’t use HA… or Apple Home…. Or anything 😪but since the tv is HomeKit enabled I wanted to keep this automation a close as possible to Reed’s

Wow thank you! I’m glad this was helpful and that you’re enjoying the content. I’ve seen some node-red tutorials but they…. Don’t seem to get a lot of traction or views. Since the demand seems low I’ve put that project on the backlog until interest grows. Since you brought it up, I would love to hear your thoughts and pain points and see what I can do to help, even if it’s to point you in the direction of specific things I found that could help. You can reach me via the Contact Me link on technithusiast.com (just reference this comment so I know it’s you 😁

Personally I stopped using node-red a few years ago as HA's automation tools got a lot better. I think it can still be handy for more complicated tasks, but typically that's a sign you need to simplify the building blocks a little first, then they are easy to do in HA anyway. If you're using a supervised setup of HA then a few clicks should have it up and running as an Add-On, I believe.

Yeah. By no means is any of this perfect as it is contextualized for each individual. I simply wanted to poke everyone's attention to the different things that could be considered when crafting an automation

I wish that feature was more standard across all smart notification devices!!! It would change the way I approach ALL my automations.

LOLOL so true and im glad you're enjoying the content. (btw, i always recognize your username and profile pic 😁)

All of your automations?! give this man a metal 🥇 :D

Thanks for commenting! If the lights turn off when Apple TV is turned on and goes to 50% when its paused after 11pm, what would happen when you play? Would it also turn off then too? What would happen in the moments when you want to keep the lights on or off?

@@technithusiast that’s a good question. The idea came because I felt that turning the lights on all the way would be too jarring late at night. Maybe instead the lights dim when the tv is turned on (and curtains close or whatever else), and lights go off for play, dimmed on for pause. I even thought about something for turning the lights back on when the TV is turned off, but I thought that might cause issues if a “goodnight” automation is in place

That’s a good point about conflicting automation states. How people implement a TV automation like this can vary based on your smart home ecosystem and your household habits. There’s no 1 right way but for the sake of maximum utility without sacrificing user experience using a button that sits close by that can toggle between modes would be the most accessible and useful. It isn’t perfect as this solution wouldn’t work for my family but many in the comments here feel like that’s the most straight-forward solution

@@technithusiast a toggle switch would be a very useful method, but for something like theatre mode, especially if it’s only activated after sunset, I cannot imagine many scenarios where I wouldn’t want it. When I would, a voice assistant usually works best for me

lol, go try it out. It's free-99

I’m glad you like the content! I think your final point touches the heart of the matter. If our smart-home is going to anticipate your needs you will always need to add more and more conditions and it will be difficult to express your routine as a static list of if/else. But if we flip it and instead have the smart-home request what we would like and we can give it some explicit commands then this becomes way more maintainable and we would have less friction of things we don’t want firing at the wrong time. Thanks for commenting!!

😂😂

Lolol thanks! i'm waiting for that mythical moment my channel explodes and i hope you'll still be here for that 😁 and i greatly enjoy node-red too! Idk how anyone can use the native HA automations when Node-red is a possibility. I would REALLLY love if they could bake node-red into HA so i don't have to use an Addon or HAC component.

Interesting. Using a button is the common response i see. That was one of my choices as i was thinking through this but i decided against it because the layout of my house did not give me a convenient place to put button and i didn't want to bring two remotes to the couch 😛

@@technithusiast The Fibaro buttons you can create the pause feature based on button presses and they can be hiden under the edge of a coffee table or other, well away from babies. Plus add MM wave sensors for extra conditining incase of occupants in areas they would rather have the window shutters open (this in open space living areas)

Yup a button can also work. The odd thing about this automation is that if you use a button to enable/disable the automation you don't know if it is enabled or disable without some other mechanism (voice alert or some notification). But like you mentioned, if you use the button as a trigger for the automation then this works well. A button wouldn't work at my place since we have no where stable to put it while watching tv but i know some folks have stands/tables/center consoles that make buttons a practical choice.

Your setup sounds really fun! Do you use HA to write your automations, node red or some other platform?

@@technithusiast I strive do do all my automations in Node-RED. I’ve created a pattern around it, where I’ve got a chain of flows - a flow dedicated to inputs and sanitization of data, another for data enrichment, another for decision making/rules, and finally one for outputs (aka Controls) that calls back to HA to do modify the environment. I use link out/in/call nodes to hook it all up. The input flow converts all input event data (button presses, sensors, events from devices like the tv or vacuum, etc.) into a canonical data model containing “input_type”, “input_mode”, etc. The enrichment flow extends that data model and adds context data about things like which room the event came from, what the current room state is in terms of lights on/off and all that, the temperature of the room, whether it’s currently day or night, etc. At that point, the decision making flow just uses all that information to decide what to do. The Control flow has separate reusable code flows called by the decision making flow. Things like “room lights on” or “narrate this text” or “vacuum this room”, etc. Love what you do on the channel, by the way, I’ve been getting a lot of great ideas from you! I love your thought process around heuristics and principled decisions for how you automate your home. Your approach is right up my alley!

Wow thank you! I’m glad this content hits for you! I love your approach to how you setup your flows and it seems agnostic to where you can add on functionality in a scalable manner. I’m not if you’ve seen my videos around OpenAI but I have nodes that may blend seamlessly into your system. Especially since you know how to use the Link In/out nodes you would like this video ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-oWP8es4g4D0.html

Yup, quite a few folks here mention they would get tired of the automation machinesplain to them 😂. The goal of this video was to get people thinking about their user experience of an automation instead of the "cool factor" or even the "ease of use" factor. The UX will vary based on family/living situation. For example my family rarely watches tv so we go weeks without this automation triggering. So the short message is a reminder that it exists and how to use it. For other families where they watch more frequently a button may be a better choice. For example your movie scene you mentioned could be triggered by a labeled button that sits on a table beside the couch. That way anyone in the family/or guest can activate it. I also think you bring up a great point that not every edge-case needs to be addressed. If i could pushback a little, I would say that if i made an automation to make something easier but in the process created an inconvenience edge-case when the original issue had no edge-case in the first place, then i should try to minimize the likelihood (or remove completely) that edge-case without over engineering. Otherwise, it would have been better to not have create the automation at all. Great comment btw.

Seamless automations are very tricky because of those situations where you don't want something to happen. Even if you want it to happen 90% of the time, the 10% when you don't want it to happen seems to hit harder.

HomeKit makes sense since he is using the Apple TV…

Good question! It's as @jpileggi1 mentioned. I wanted to keep this as close to HomeKit as possible. I was trying my best to mirror Reed's original automation which was purely HomeKit. But you are right. I could have done this entire automation purely in Home Assistant... but sometime ya boi wants a challenge and change of pace 😛

yeah the name of the scene was rather hastily named 😓

LOLOL. I see you got your thinking cap on 😁🧢. You're correct that it could get annoying and that a button would be better. I wanted to show how the principles led me to create an automation that made for a great UX for our family, and how that manifests for your family will be different. The fact that you can identify that this would be annoying means you are thinking more deeply than most! In my case, my family and I will go weeks without turning on the tv (we not TV people) So the voice activation also act as a reminder.To be honest i get startled when it goes off with how infrequently it fires. Our living room layout doesn't provide a good spot to put a button. We would have to bring both the Apple TV remote and a wireless button to the couch if we wanted to toggle the lights which felt silly for us. But even though buttons wouldn't work for us it still may work for others so definitely go for it!

You could mitigate that a little bit by restricting the mansplaining to once per watching session, or even once per day. When you start a show, it checks in: “We doing the lights thing for this movie or no?”

Very interesting approach. I have a few modes for my home but i've been purposefully limiting them as I find that things can get out of hand. Do you run into conflicting modes, or have modes that turn on/off but you don't know why or how something happened? Also how are you organizing your modes and what do you use to create your modes (HA or NR?)

@@technithusiast Thanks! Your content is right up my alley because you're going that one step further like I've always had to do to keep me and the wife happy. The HA forums confuse me as half those automations on there as they are would just annoy us here. Yeah they get unmanageable and I'm currently trying to devise a way to actually manage that. Conflicts happen but I haven't yet, touch wood, run into any I couldn't figure out. I started out with HA automations and hated the lack of organisation, I tried my hand at a fully coded approach with my own solution in node-js, that was ace but I've recently had a kid and can't spend 4-5 hours writing that anymore. I then moved to node-red and hit a similar wall/time sink with writing my own nodes feeding all of this. Then recently moved back to HA after the organisation improvements with labels and categories. So far those are working much better. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. I loved having node red generate devices for my rooms with all the modes as entities. It kept the automations in HA simple but it was a pain to quickly edit. If HA could create devices/entities with blueprints with the recent organisation boost I think I'd finally be happy. Have you played with the Bayesian sensor at all? Another idea was I'd seen a blueprint on the community page, with 0 comments or likes nonetheless, with a guy who wrote a blueprint system parsing automation names. So rather than conditions everywhere ( which becomes a memory hole ) you just write one blueprint to turn modes on and off based on the current state which seemed easier but I haven't tried it yet. I'm also trying to think of a way to do asserts, I mess with automations a lot and sometimes they break and I get an unhappy wife with no hot water for her shower 🤣. The asserts would at least warn me before that happened. "If no hot water by wifey bath time... Shout at me to sort and check the automation".

@@jamesmackay6815lol I feel your pain. I think tags have been a great step in the right direction but me personally have never been able to use tags effectively and end up with orphaned tags or tags with a single entity attached to it. But I still think it’s great! Idk if you code it you mentioned node JS and I assume you are aware of JavaScript being an event driven system. I’ve seen websites code go overboard with events and it created bugs due to conflicting modes or obscured events triggering different events. I’ve heard of the Bayesian sensor but haven’t learned how to use it. It seems really mystical and since it deals with probabilities I imagine it’s difficult to test effectively. If I figure out how to do modes effectively at scale I’ll let you know :D

@@technithusiast Hurry up! xD Yeah I'm finding same, I feel they're a bit too "free" if you get me. Currently the categories are lovely, but the labels I've been using haphazardly. I more use them as sub area's than anything else and not everything has a sub area requirement. Yeah I code, been a nodejs developer for a while now, event based is problematic sometimes, node red certainly handled that well in their integration. I liked I could wait for a state, or continue if already in that state. The same thing isn't so simple on Home Assistant. Nor when I'd coded my system on HA websocket. Bayesian is certainly, and part of the reason I've stayed away from it, but it keeps cropping up in my mind...

@@jamesmackay6815understanding and finding a good use for the Bayesian sensor is on my todo list. It seems like sophisticated tool that could solve a specific problem set well. But I admit that after reading through the docs for it, my mind went into hibernation-mode 😂

LOL, not surprised. Automations that are seamless are extremely prone to being deleted or disabled because they have to be useful without being annoying 100% of the time otherwise ☠️

Yup, this automation sounds useful but quickly becomes annoying without a way to disable it. I like the cube idea btw 😁

What paywall did you hit?