I really like Home Assistant’s triggers and actions model for its flexibility

Years ago, I bought Philips Hue set with a bridge, motion sensor, light switch and a set of lights to add a small piece of smart tech into my home. They worked great and the ability to schedule on/off, use a motion sensor for night lights when getting up from bed and being able to control lights with my phone was a great experience.

But it had a fundamental problem. It was all tied to Philips Hue software and all any of it could do was turn lights on and off and adjust their color and brightness. There was very little customisability.

I only really realised this once I set up Home Assistant this spring and started tinkering with home automation features. I’ve been documenting my setup in Garden of Learning where I update my notes (including details on how I’ve set stuff up) and add new ones whenever I set something new up.

My set of lights came with one of these light switches that have four buttons: on, off, brightness up, brightness down. I have mine next to my computer and the only thing I ever used it for was pressing lights on when I left my desk to go to bedroom. So not only was I never using the three other buttons, there are different modes of triggering these buttons: starting a press, releasing a short press and doing a long press at least.

As I started using Home Assistant, I started to get more ideas for what I can do with this. I started by using the long press of brightness up to boot my entire living room entertainment system: PS4, AV receiver, video projector (and later once I replace my living room lights with smart lights, I can dim them as well).

After a while, I realised that sometimes if I want to play something late at night, I want to play with different settings (mainly lower volume) so I added a “set volume to night mode” to a long press of brightness down. And then I used short presses for up/down to turn volume up and down so I can finetune easily if I’m playing games from my desk.

I understand how for many non-technical user, simplicity is a benefit. But separating inputs/triggers from outputs/actions opens up the game to so many amazing things you can do. In Unix community, that’s a philosophy called Do one thing and do it well and it’s a great guideline for building products when combined with interoperability so you can combine products and tools as you wish.

Eventually, I want to design and build my own remote control with a wide range of buttons that I can then map to actions via Home Assistant but before I can do that, I want to learn more about my usage and discover ideas for what I could do (and also I need to learn how to build those kinds of physical electronics projects).