If you want to skip wiring all together, pick up two Aurora Dimmers and put Hue bulbs in all your sockets. It’s not the cheapest or most privacy friendly if you’re using their hub. But going this way, you can put the dimmer near the fixture you want to control, you have no wiring whatsoever, connection to HA, and you’re completely up and running inside of 30 minutes.

Alright. Let’s get the ratgdo guy on this. I’d pre-order a rathvac today.

So he’s attracted to Girls plus Puberty.

I’ve got physical buttons attached to several ESPHome projects. It’d be trivial to make one just a momentary push button. Beware of ESPHome though, once you start down that path, you’re going to want to build sensors yourself and start automating things that don’t need automation.

I did this at my house too. I’ve also got a card for turning off the the TV and the lights when the kids are done in that room.

The best thing I ever did with home automation and children is to setup motion sensors in the hallway and tie it to my WLED strips. If anyone in the house leaves a bedroom at night, led light strips in the hallway, along the stairs, and downstairs turn on low and red for 5 minutes. There’s no turning on lights or forgetting to turn them off. It’s bright enough to see but not so bright that is jarring. Also, using red light doesn’t kill your night vision when you go back to a dark room.

Are there certain features you’ve grown to rely on?

I use plaintext documents with markdown. There’s a markdown editor for the web. Markor is an excellent Android app. Take your pick of a number of text editors with markdown.

Let’s keep going down the rabbit hole! You can build your own using ESPHome.

I have a Pi 3 running Home Assistant. I also have two Pi Zeros that I have MP4 Museum installed.

I use MP4 Museum to run projected Halloween decorations mostly but it’s great to have a little box that will take a video file from a thumbdrive and dump it out the HDMI port on boot.

Give ncdu a look. It is on Linux. It will allow you to see big chunks of data. I’m sure someone has a container version of it, but you can run it straight from the terminal.

I’ve got a D9 running with Valetudo! It’s fantastic! Not only am I [not] worried about privacy concerns, but it works with my HA seamlessly. Check out their list of supported vacuums.

FlorisBoard is great! It’s not had a release in about year but that doesn’t mean it’s not under active development. The developer is currently working on the Natural Language Processing component.