So last week I had a Proxmox fuckup and lost everything. I learnt the hard way what living without backups is like and I don’t recommend it.
Silver lining is that I don’t have to tidy up all those old automations and entities anymore.
Anyway it made me realise what I’d miss if I didn’t have them, because I didn’t have them.
I’ve been really really tired this week. I get up at 5am and start work at 6, and while I don’t like it, I usually cope with it better than most and have comments about how “It’s too early for you.” But not this week.
I’ve put it down to losing my connection between my alarm clock and HA. I use SleepAsAndroid and have done for a long time. Back when I started it was because it connected to Tasker, but over the years I’ve moved to HA and still use it.
SleepAsAndroid with Tasker was done with web hooks but I use the MQTT integration with HA. This means it’s connected when I’m home but not in network when I’m away, so it can’t fire the messages, which is what you want.
Previously I used Node Red to set up this automation but I haven’t reinstalled it yet, I’m seeing if I can do it all on HA, then it’s one less thing and I can automate in the app.
I spent a while this morning trying to figure out how to reintegrate it with HA and struggled, but eventually I found an integration in HACS which meant I just had to change my device identifier in the alarm app by adding /MyName to the end of the SleepAsAndroid topic so it reads SleepAsAndroid/MyName, add the HACS integration and then add it again in the Integrations pane, with MyName plumbed in.
Then I added a blueprint from the add ons page and left the house to go on a day trip.
In and amongst the day trip I’ve been making my automation on the HA app via the blueprint, and have come home, loaded a bowl and set my alarm for 1 minute time, then smoke the bowl and wait…
Success!
Hopefully I’ll have more energy this week when I wake up to my lights turning on, instead of complete darkness and a strange noise.
Now what would you miss that isn’t obvious (like motion activated lights)?
https://github.com/IATkachenko/HA-SleepAsAndroid is the add on if anyone is interested and this is the app https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid.sleep which I paid for premium long ago and have shared that premium with family account to my son’s phone too, well worth buying.
When my alarm goes off my hallway light and the lamp on the far side of the room turn on low and the alarm remains silent for a minute, then ramps the volume up.
This means I can get up and not wake Wifey, huge WAF benefits…
I turn the alarm off and HA waits for the motion sensor in the hallway to pick me up, then the far lamp goes off. The next motion sensor on the floor below turns the hallway light off and the front room lights on for me (while the motion sensors do their usual stuff, this is extra).
I also used to use this automation to turn the “I’m sleeping” switch off but I haven’t set my sleeping up properly again yet.
If I snooze, the lights go off again and come on when snooze is finished the same as an alarm.
Now to set up my teenage Son’s alarm, he was nearly late to school once this week which is unheard of
fyi if you use the homeassistent app HA knows (if enabled) the time of your next set alarm (it’s in the sensor settings for the app)
You are correct, but when I’ve used it there was disparities between the time and what it reported the time was. It was out by an hour because of BST.