Home Automation

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Home automation is the residential extension of building automation.

It is automation of the home, housework or household activity.

Home automation may include centralized control of lighting, HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning), appliances, security locks of gates and doors and other systems, to provide improved convenience, comfort, energy efficiency and security.

Warning: Working with electricity can result in injury, property damage, or even death if it is not done properly. Please keep this in mind while assisting others. If you are not sure about what you are doing, hire a licensed professional.

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First automation project (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hii all. I hoped someone could help with a noob with the following requirements. I am a CPAP user with sleep apnea. Because I'm exhausted in the evening, I sometimes pass out before remembering to put on my CPAP, which just makes things worse the next day. I was hoping to design a system that would alert me by a certain time, for example 11pm, if I don't have the machine on. I could then wake up and put it on and go to sleep again.

The machine itself doesn't seem to expose any hooks that would allow this to happen. However, if I could monitor the current from some kind of smart plug and then add some simple logic (if current to CPAP plug = 0 and time = 11pm), then I could create an alarm in my phone to get me up.

I'm tech savvy and can do programming, but I don't have much experience with home automation systems. Can anyone suggest a path forward?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

So if the only thing you're looking to do is this one thing, you can definitely get just a smart plug and use any number of little things to automate a routine for it.

That said, if you're a nerd and you like the idea of automations like this, you probably won't stop at just one or two and you might as well do what I just did last week and start with the "gold standard" which is Home Assistant.

It's self hosted, free, has tons of documentation and info online, lots of people who wanna help, and works with a whole lot of stuff to keep you from being locked into an ecosystem.

That said, if you happen to be an Apple user they also have a very solid setup that's more straightforward with their HomeKit.

Home Assistant can run as it's own OS on something like a Raspberry Pi, or if you have a spare PC you can toss Linux on there and run it from a Docker container in about five minutes.

At that point you would just need to find a wi-fi plug or grab a zigbee controller to plug into that PC and one of those plugs and automation to do what you want would take about five minutes.

Just getting started in all this stuff myself so I'm not an expert and others here will know a lot more specifics, but that said I'm loving Home Assistant so far and it's cost nothing but time at this point to get some cool automations going.