I have been having some difficulty figuring out what smart home environments and hubs I could use to fit my needs. A few years ago, I tried using google home to control my lights only to find out google home was mostly incapable of logic more complicated than turning devices on and off. Now, I want to try automations again, but I do not want to make the same mistakes again.
I want to automate my bedroom. I want two primary states: awake and asleep. During awake, I want all lights to turn on when a presence sensor detects someone. During asleep, I want lights to stay off regardless. I want a smart home button to be able to toggle between awake and asleep states. I would like if a wakeup routine could trigger at a certain time to slowly turn on the lights and when it is over, the state could change to awake. I also want a smart button to be able to set lights to a movie mode, which could also change my windows PC display settings. (I assume changing windows settings isn’t directly possible with any hub, but if it is I’d like to know.)
The components I plan on having are two lightbulbs, an led strip, a smart plug, a mm presence sensor, and either a multi-input button or a smart home display to use for inputs.
Can google home now do this? Can Amazon or Apple’s home environments do this? Would IFTTT work? Would I at the bare minimum need a proper smart home hub like home assistant? Please let me know.
Fibaro will do this and more either using block scenes or LUA programing
I’ve had good success using Hubitat. Like you I tried the Google Home path but, we soon became convinced we were being spied on via the assistant to send us advertising emails and we found it rather creepy when it would join into conversations uninvited. Gmail was another issue in business as customers with gmail addresses had emails from us manipulated to insert ads for other Google services. I don’t trust “free” big tech cloud offerings. With Hubitat I have created home & business security that was both local and without subscriptions using sensors and sirens. I set up my own sprinkler timer and controls which has been very handy when working on sprinklers in the yard as I avoid trips to the garage to turn various zones on or off to flush lines & etc. by simply using a “dashboard” on my Android phone. Slightly funky interface though it offers some very powerful capabilities which I believe could perform all of the functions you describe. It is a smaller company with frequently miserable documentation and website. The community seems a bit cliquish and someone new might find themselves scolded for posting a question in the wrong group or not having read the right documentation. It works great once you figure it all out. It has integrations which allow Google or Alexa but I’ve never liked talking to things that aren’t real people. I have a google home hub, google speaker, and google home mini all collecting dust after multiple undisclosed privacy intrusions from Google. Those were particularly irritating when emails to customers were modified without notice by Google which resulted in complaints and confusion just because the customer had a gmail address and used a Google client. 6-bit answer I guess.
Any proper hub can do the awake/asleep most have some form of PC integration. Amazon/apple/google pretty much exist to push product none of them have much power behind them integrate with a real hub home assistant runs fine on a 1g pi 3.
Why a button for movie mode? You can read the status of your streaming to see if it’s a movie playing even get theming information.
Using streaming status is a good idea and could further automate my system. The only problem is that I wanted one button to change both the lights and also change the active monitor from my desk to the one facing my bed. It could be distracting opening a streaming service on my desktop only for the monitor to suddenly go black and turn on the other one. I also might want to open steam and not Netflix, for example. I also want to turn my scaling up on the other monitor.
These are all things less complicated using a hotkey on the PC than getting HA back into it. You can do it either way just less of a pita.