20 Home Automation Ideas Submitted by YOU!

5 Comments

1. BIG THANKS to everyone that submitted an automaton! Which was your favorite??

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2. so many great ideas

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3. I’m using a Sonoff water valve to water our garden. I daisy chain it with a dumb water timer (no automation, just digital timer) for a failsafe. The dumb water timer is only open at 3-3:30am every day. then homeassistant controls the Sonoff to turn on the water for 20-30 min and won’t cycle on if we’ve received rain in the last 2 days.

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4. Hi Shane, I want to add one automation from my side as well

   Random Motivational Quotes for the Kids’ Brushing Routine (Home Assistant + iOS Shortcuts)
   The problem
   I had a 9 PM teeth-brushing routine for my daughter built entirely around 7 Apple Shortcuts — “Brush 1” through “Brush 7” — each one an intercom announcement with a different fixed motivational message, mapped one-per-day-of-week (Sunday → Brush 1, Monday → Brush 2, etc.). It worked, but it meant pre-recording/pre-writing 7 messages and manually keeping the day-of-week mapping straight. Nothing dynamic about it.

   The idea
   Replace the fixed messages with a live feed of quotes. Instead of picking from 7 pre-written lines, fetch a fresh random motivational quote from the internet every single time the routine runs — so the message is genuinely different, indefinitely, with zero maintenance.

   The approach
   Rather than keep triggering the Apple Shortcuts from Home Assistant (Apple’s “run a Shortcut via notification” mechanism turned out to require a manual tap on a notification — not the silent, automatic trigger I needed), I flipped the architecture: Home Assistant does the fetching, iOS Shortcuts does the speaking.

   1. A rest_command in configuration.yaml that hits the free ZenQuotes API — no signup, no API key, 5 requests/30 sec on the free tier, which is plenty for a once-a-day trigger:

   rest_command:
   get_motivational_quote:
   url: “https://zenquotes.io/api/random”
   method: get
   timeout: 10
   2. A Home Assistant script that calls it, extracts the quote text, falls back to a small hardcoded list if the API is ever unreachable, prepends a personalized greeting, and — instead of speaking it itself — returns the finished message as response data so it can be picked up by whatever called it:

   brush_teeth_motivation:
   alias: “Brush Teeth – Motivational Message”
   icon: mdi:tooth-outline
   mode: single
   sequence:
   – action: rest_command.get_motivational_quote
   response_variable: quote_response
   continue_on_error: true

   – variables:
   fallback_quotes:
   – “You can do this — keep going, one brush at a time!”
   – “Small habits every day add up to big results — great job brushing!”
   – “Believe in yourself and brush with confidence!”
   – “Every superhero needs a super smile — let’s brush!”
   – “You’re doing amazing — two more minutes and you’re done!”
   quote_text: >-
   {% if quote_response is defined
   and quote_response.status is defined
   and quote_response.status == 200
   and quote_response.content is iterable
   and quote_response.content | length > 0 %}
   {{ quote_response.content[0].q }}
   {% else %}
   {{ fallback_quotes | random }}
   {% endif %}

   – variables:
   quote_result:
   quote: >-
   Hi (basically my daughter’s name), it’s time to brush your teeth! Here’s some motivation for you: {{ quote_text }}

   – stop: “Return the quote text to whoever called this script”
   response_variable: quote_result
   3. On the iOS side, a Shortcut chains three actions: Perform Action (picking script.brush_teeth_motivation) → Get Dictionary Value (key: quote, pulling the string out of the returned JSON) → Speak Text / Intercom. That Shortcut can be triggered manually, from a Home Screen widget, via Siri, or from the existing 9 PM automation — same result every time: a fresh quote, spoken out loud.

   Gotchas I ran into along the way
   “Run Script” vs. “Perform Action” in iOS Shortcuts — these look similar but behave very differently. “Run Script” fires the script but returns nothing. “Perform Action” is the one that actually passes response data back into the Shortcut. Easy to pick the wrong one.
   HA script response data must be a dictionary, not a bare string. response_variable requires a mapping of key/value pairs ({“quote”: “…”}), so Shortcuts always receives a small JSON object — you need a “Get Dictionary Value” step to pull the actual string out of it before feeding it to Speak Text, or you’ll hear the raw “quote”: “…” structure read aloud.
   The two YAML editors in HA expect different shapes. The per-script “Edit in YAML” view (Settings → Scripts → your script → ⋮ → Edit in YAML) wants just the script’s fields (alias, sequence, etc.) with no wrapping key. A raw scripts.yaml file, on the other hand, needs each script wrapped under its own id (brush_teeth_motivation: …). Pasting the wrong shape into the wrong place throws a “not a valid option” error.
   New scripts can take a while to show up in the Shortcuts app’s HA action picker — a known caching quirk in the Companion App. Force-closing and reopening both apps (or, failing that, a phone restart) clears it.
   A new rest_command: block needs a full Home Assistant restart, not just a YAML reload, to take effect.
   Result
   One script, triggered however I like (Shortcut, widget, Siri, or a plain HA automation), returns a different genuine motivational quote — pulled live from the internet — every single time it runs, with zero ongoing maintenance and a graceful fallback if the API’s ever unreachable.

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5. We have some LED Sports signs that turn on 4 hours prior to a game and turn on 2 hours after a game with smart plugs so it feels like a sports family room and we know when our favorite teams are playing that day or are done.

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