[dmd]

My overall philosophy for (my quite extensive) Home Assistant setup is “amy time a human interacts with the HA UI in any way whatsoever, that is a failure.” I don’t want dashboards, I don’t want a user interface at ALL other than for setting up new automation. The point of HA for me is the house should feel like the correct things happen by magic (and should be essentially unobtrusive and natural).

[wolvoleo]

Oh that's not my philosophy at all. I don't like too much automation because I'm very fussy as to what I want at one moment. It all depends on my mood which home assistant doesn't know. Sometimes when I enter a room I want the lights on, other times I don't, stuff like that. Like when the curtains are open and I'm walking around half naked. And sometimes I just like the dark and sometimes I need bright lights. Sometimes I need heat and sometimes sitting in 16 degrees (C) is totally fine. Yeah I'm weird I know :)

Also I'm really chaotic in terms of schedule. My mood and behaviour changes by the day.

I use it more as a monitoring and control tool.

Not saying your way is bad, it's more as HA is intended. But I'm just saying it won't work for me.

[enobrev]

I'm similarly unpredictable in my home. Add to that the others in my house, and it's impossible to even guess what everyone's intentions are at any given time.

Sometimes I daydream about a "solo mode" where the timings on lights are tighter and my music can follow me around the house when I'm up at night and nobody else is. But most times I'm trying to find the get-out-of-way averages that keep everyone happy.

Some things work great: Automated lights everywhere. Automated dimming of lights at night or sunset or whatever. Notifications when the laundry is done, or the cat litter is ready to be changed, or someone is at the door, or the garage door has been left open - all great. What music to play in what room at any time? Always changes. When to "dim all the lights" because Plex started a movie? But my son is building Legos in the dining room, and my wife is knitting and needs the couch light on. Sometimes I want it, but not every time.

For those things having a single button press is still a huge win over opening multiple apps and getting the right things set the right way for each participant.

[cyberge99]

Same. My environment molds to my comfort, not the other way around.

[gerdesj]

I'm pretty close to your approach too. I rather like lights, water features etc just switching themselves on and off as required. I use the UI to go off piste for me only and not for the wife (at home) or employees (at work)

HA's automations are getting rather good these days but Nodered is handy for when things get complicated. HA has a very neat Nodered integration maintained by Frenck, who is a HA dev.

My general directive is that any automation that is important should be able to work via manual means. Sadly my (Reolink) doorbell does not currently have a hard wired chime. The previous one (Doorbird) did.

At work, my office has 40 odd windows and I have slapped a zwave sensor on all of them and all doors. Its quite handy to have a blank list of open doors/windows on a panel (HA) next to the alarm panel as you set the alarm. The auto entities card is very useful.

[cpcloud]

I've honestly never explored HA. Is there a world where HA obviates micasa. That seems like a win, at least in terms of not having yet another piece of software duplicating an existing thing.