I was reading the HA roadmap and thinking about the points where everyone (else) interacts with my HA environment. I’ve wanted displays/dashboards for a long time but mostly have either battery powered buttons or smart wall switches. These are good in that I can automate them but with two teenage children we have a lot of variability.
Tell me how everyone else uses HA in your house. Do they love it? Do they see only that buttons ‘do things’? Do they read dashboards and crave data?
There are a few buttons around the house. For my wife (and kids to play with) the most important ones are the ones controlling the light in the bedroom. There is a motion sensor covering the door and wardrobe area which can be muted with a button (e.g. if the kids have snuck into our bed and we don’t want to wake them or if either one of us goes to bed later). We use mostly the IKEA Zigbee buttons.
We also have a great device called Home Buttons in our kitchen. It uses MQTT and has a fantastic battery life (using a 18650 rechargeable battery). It has an e-ink display and six buttons. I programmed it to display several things (you can use one MDI icon and a short text to display for each button) for everyday use, like switching some lights, displaying temperature and humidity and controlling the climate in our conservatory. You have to press a button for it to update (to save battery - even though it easily lasts months).
The main touch point though is the app. I built three dashboards:
But I also made Home Assistant send notifications to our smartphones for several events (dishwasher, washing machine, too hot / cold in the conservatory, low blood glucose levels, kids turning on the TV in the morning). Some of them offer to respond with an action others are just reminders that something needs to be done.
My wife appreciates especially the notifications I think because you don’t have to think about some things as they pop up when action is due and we both can more easily share the workload as she gets notified as well when I started the dishwasher without me needing to tell her. (This may sound like we’re not speaking to each other, but we’re just not saying things like I just started the dishwasher can you empty it later.)
Our dishwasher and washing machines take long enough that sometimes that notification is for the same person that started it. I’ve started the dishwasher and then gone about my business doing things, completely forgetting the dishwasher. This way I remember to go unload it and start it again. (We do a lot of cooking/baking at home, so our dishwasher probably gets ran ~2 times on a weekday and sometimes 4+ times on weekend days)
The washing machine is similar. Nice to know there’s wet clothes in the machine that need moved to the dryer so I don’t forget them. I don’t automate the dryer finishing because the clothes in there are fine if they sit.