4 unexpected ways I use Home Assistant (that aren’t for my smart home)
As its name suggests, Home Assistant was designed for smart home automation. It is a powerful tool to automate all the smart devices in your home. To my surprise, some of the best ways to use Home Assistant have nothing to do with my smart home.
Getting my wife’s attention
This might be my favorite Home Assistant automation, and it has absolutely nothing to do with controlling my smart home. Instead, it solves a real problem that bothered me for years until I created my own solution using Home Assistant.
Whenever I tried to contact my wife for something important, she always missed my calls or messages because her phone was on silent and she didn’t feel it vibrate. The opposite was also true; I regularly missed important messages and calls from him.
You can use the emergency bypass feature on an iPhone to allow specific contacts to override silent mode. However, this is a permanent replacement, so every call or message will be accompanied by sound alerts, which is not what either of us wanted.
Home Assistant lets you send notifications to a phone as critical alerts. These notifications can override silent mode and Do Not Disturb settings to play a loud notification sound. This turned out to be the perfect solution.
I created a shortcut on my phone that asks for a message to be entered and then sends that message to my wife as a critical alert via Home Assistant. The message comes to her phone and plays a loud, prolonged notification sound, even though her phone is on silent. She has a similar shortcut on her phone that sends a critical alert to my device.
It works incredibly well. We hardly miss each other’s important messages anymore, and what was once a regular source of irritation is now a thing of the past.
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Medication recalls
This is another case where I couldn’t find an app or service that did exactly what I wanted, but using Home Assistant I was able to create the specific features I needed. I have to take medication every day for some health conditions and have tried using dedicated medication reminder apps as well as Apple’s Medication app. Even while taking them, there were days when I forgot to take my pills.
The main problem was that I took my medication in the evening and when I was out I had to turn off notifications from reminder apps so as not to disturb everyone around me every 30 minutes with a notification sound at full volume. When I got home, I completely forgot to take them.
I created my own medication reminder tool using actionable notifications in Home Assistant. Every evening I receive a critical alert reminding me to take my pills. This is an actionable notification, with options to remind me in an hour, remind me in two hours, remind me silently, or remind me when I get home. If I don’t select any of the options, I automatically receive another critical alert every 30 minutes until I tap “I took it” on the actionable notification.
The most useful part is the ability to remind me when I get home. It stops the reminders while I’m away and as soon as I get home, the geolocation triggers another critical alert reminding me to take my pills. Since its implementation, I have never missed taking my medication.
Track my children’s chores
Getting my kids to help with household chores has always been a chore in itself. I wanted to try and find a way to gamify things so that they were incentivized to complete their tasks instead of us nagging them all the time. Setting up task tracking was exactly what I needed.
There are several ready-made task trackers created by other Home Assistant users. I used the KidsChores custom integration because it seemed like the one my kids would like the most.
Now my kids have tasks to complete every day that can earn them coins. They can exchange coins for candy on Friday or save coins to exchange for a toy or other gift from the store. They can also lose coins if they behave badly.
The chore tracker is a big hit. Kids love being able to mark their own tasks on the dashboard, and for us it’s easy to approve tasks only once they’re done correctly. This was a real victory for parents and children.
Keep me focused while I work
This is probably the most effective thing I’ve ever done to improve my productivity. One of my biggest problems is that when I research an article, I end up going down a rabbit hole about some obscure Home Assistant trigger or niche smart home sensor, and I waste a ton of time reading things that aren’t necessary for my article.
I wanted to try to find a way out of these situations, and Home Assistant provided it. If you use the Home Assistant companion app on macOS, it exposes a sensor called Frontmost App, which tells you which app is currently active on your computer.
Using this sensor, I created an automation that generates a sarcastic comment if I use anything other than a very small set of purely work-related apps. If I spend more than a few minutes in a browser, for example, it will blame me for wasting time and tell me to get back to work.
The macOS app exposes another sensor called Active, which looks for mouse movements or keyboard inputs to determine whether you’re using the computer. After a minute of inactivity when I should be working, I receive an announcement asking me to hang up my phone.
I use a mmWave occupancy sensor to determine if I’m in my office chair so the automation doesn’t work if I’m not there. I also use the presence sensor to tell me to get up if I’ve been sitting for too long.
Home Assistant is primarily smart home software, but it’s so versatile that you can use it for things beyond just turning on lights or smart plugs. These days, when there’s a problem I want to solve, I wonder if I could solve it using Home Assistant.
