8 ms·

I just want to share that these are by far the best home automation you can have. I love my smart lights, hacked together smart humidifier, smart fans (the vorn

I just want to share that these are by far the best home automation you can have. I love my smart lights, hacked together smart humidifier, smart fans (the vornado dc fans with outlet switches), intake air pump, and air quality monitoring. But nothing has the quality of life impact of smart blinds. It’s the best, and probably only, way to reliably keep your sleep schedule in sync. Smart lightbulbs - four of the brightest you can buy - are nothing compared to a window on a cloudy day.

threatofrain 1y ago
Could we hear more about your home automation stack? I'm looking to get into this myself.
- joshvm 1y ago
  Can't speak for OP, but just get Home Assistant running and play around. It'll work in Docker in anything, but it's a good use for an old Raspberry Pi. There isn't much more of a stack than that, and HA is by far the most polished OSS solution. It's got some sharp edges - every time I've done a major auto-update it's broken something critical. You can run it alongside other controllers like the Hue Bridge, which is nice to have as a backup (since 90% of what most people connect is smart lighting). Probably the most useful simple automation I have is an motion activated dim light in the bathroom at night, but that's using Hue. Then look at ESPHome, which is an ecosystem for making your own DIY sensors and controllers that can feed into HA. For example we have a Sensirion air quality sensor that triggers a smart switch connected to a fan if the particulate level gets high when cooking. You can go a very long way with on/off to control non-smart devices, and your sensors don't need to be particularly accurate (like absolute PM2.5) as long as the conditon you trigger on is repeatable. The only thing to think about is what hardware ecosystem makes sense for you. For example there's at least four different competing standards for connectivity (WiFi, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter/Thread, etc). So getting a Zigbee dongle isn't a bad idea because then you can connect any IKEA or Hue device (among others).
  - asdefghyk 1y ago
    RE ".....if the particulate level gets high when cooking ....." What is the particale counter level you use ? The number ? Just curious.
    - joshvm 1y ago
      If over 100 ug/m3 for 2 minutes, turn on, if under 10 for 10, turn off. If someone's cooking, there is a very predictable spike that peaks in the low hundreds and then decays (super-) exponentially. It was surprising to see how long it takes to get back to ambient. I think you'd have to cook a steak with the stove extractor off to hit 1000 and our hard-wired smoke alarm would definitely be going off. I have no idea how absolutely accurate the SEN55 is, but the background level is usually below 5. I don't live in a particularly polluted place, so that seems reasonable. NOx is almost always zero.
  - Larrikin 1y ago
    Home Assistant is nice for this crowd in that you can actually use a real programming language to do the automations. I went with PyScript but NodeRed is very popular as well. No need for YAML
    - mikepurvis 1y ago
      Can you? I should give it another try. I remember giving it a look a few years ago and it looked like a considerable amount of the setup was going to take place through a web GUI and then be persisted in its internal database. For a server I have to maintain over time, I'd rather things be as stateless as possible so that the cost of doing a scripted redeploy is basically zero.
      - theshrike79 1y ago
        PyScript runs inside HA and IIRC the Python in it has some quirks because of it. AppDaemon[0] runs alongside it and is more "real" Python, it mostly just responds to events sent to it. NodeRED has a direct integration and is (in my experience) best for complex state machines as you can easily debug them and actually see the logic work. They also have a REST API to trigger things and a Websocket API if you need more real-time stuff (subscribing to events instead of querying states) Then there is just straight up MQTT, where you need to do it all yourself. What HA shines is that it tends to have ready-made community integrations with _everything_. And enough users for each that if something breaks, people will notice and it'll be fixed promptly. [0] https://github.com/AppDaemon/appdaemon https://github.com/AppDaemon/appdaemon
- J_Shelby_J 1y ago
  The home assistant $100 stand alone device. Pretty seamless user experience. On par with what you would expect for a consumer device as far as UX. Maybe could be a bit more polished but you can do pretty much anything with it as far extending the ecosystem. My only complaint is that writing automations in untyped yaml sucks. Fortunately, if you dump the docs in an LLM it can one shot most things - if you’re trying to do something the gui automation tool doesn’t support. The rest is zigbee and zwave switches and sensors. You can get cheap ones from ikea. You can get nicer ones from Zooz. I like Apollo for air quality sensors. The humidifier is the German brand Ventura. Zero maintenance. But it’s not smart so I got a power outlet that reports power usage. When it runs out of water the humidifier shuts off and the power goes to zero, so I have an automation that detects that and sends a message via the HA app. Living in California and having fans move air around from cool rooms to warmer rooms has cut our AC bill significantly as a dc fan is a fraction of power consumption of a whole house AC. And also co2 levels stay much lower. Last week I set up my window fan to blow air in whenever it’s cooler outside then inside.
- scotty79 1y ago
  I think you can read about OP's automation stack here: https://sifter.org/~simon/journal/20240412.html https://sifter.org/~simon/journal/20240412.html
seanalltogether 1y ago
Automated blinds can also have a good effect on temperature control. In the summer you can have your south facing blinds automatically close when you leave the house to block out the sun.
- Spivak 1y ago
  So that's a funny thing, your blinds are on the inside of your house so the sun energy is hitting them and dissipating from there. Hopefully your blinds are white and reflecting more of it out than the other surfaces it would otherwise hit. But if you want to make a real temperature difference you need blinds on the other side of the insulated box otherwise known as an awning.
  - FreebasingLLMs 1y ago
    [dead]
  - blacksmith_tb 1y ago
    The only tricky part being that it's desirable to limit the amount of sun shining into the house in the warmer months, but not the cooler ones. Awnings that fold or are otherwise removable are a reasonable solution, there are also sunshades which mount outside, and also use a spinning rod to raise and lower (if the electronics and motor here could be weatherproofed a little they might be quite usable).
    - asdefghyk 1y ago
      Having the blind close to the window and covering at least a extra 6 inches or 15 cm band around edge of window significantly reduces light spillage into the room, when the blind is down, in my experience.
    - scotty79 1y ago
      In cooler months the sun is lower over the horizon so the awning block less of it.
foobarian 1y ago
The blinds shown under this article are pretty ordinary vinyl type blinds that leak a ton of light. I wish I could find blinds thick enough to behave like cardboard over windows, that could also be opened on a daily cadence. At this point I gave up on blinds and put a shirt over my eyes to sleep. I thought about just covering the windows permanently but I don't relish that idea.
- ojame 1y ago
  Not sure what country you're from, but "blockout blinds" are likely what you're looking for. They blockout (essentially) all light and are operated like normal blinds.
  - danielheath 1y ago
    Have never seen blockout blinds which stop enough light during the day - they leak enough to be comparable to a reading lamp, since outdoors is so bright.
    - sokka_h2otribe 1y ago
      Mounted internal to the window frame, not external, works better for me. Internal can ride tighter to the window, so light can't go out the edges. With external frame mounting, you need much wider shades. If the fabric itself isn't blocking light... You need better material. I have only ever had problem with light leakage in the edges, not in the fabric material. I believe 'blackout thermal shades' is what to look for.
    - theoreticalmal 1y ago
      Do you sleep during the day typically?
    - zrobotics 1y ago
      I used to work night shift and tried a few different things. Maybe the super-premium blinds block more light, but IME the most effective solution is blackout curtains. You'll need to hang a curtain rod that's wider than the window and get curtains that are wide enough, ideally just a single curtain rather than 2 if your window is narrow enough.
seanmcdirmid 1y ago
Ya, it’s especially nice if you have a lot of windows and want to open or close them all at once. Lutron blinds were the first improvement we made to the house and was a no brainer even at the highish price we paid.
TimByte 1y ago
There's just something about waking up to actual sunlight (even filtered through clouds) that no amount of artificial brightness can replicate. It's like your brain knows the difference.
- 05 1y ago
  Indoor lighting is about two orders of magnitude dimmer, you’d need 1kW/m*2 (100W/sqft) to emulate a cloudless day at noon, so 20kW just to light up your living room, not accounting for LED losses.
  - adrianN 1y ago
    You can get away with less because a good part of the power is outside the visible range.
    - bitdivision 1y ago
      Apparently 42% is visible! Less than I expected. So around 470 W/m2 visible radiation.
  - TimByte 1y ago
    No wonder a walk outside wakes you up better than a pot of coffee
Chris2048 1y ago
There's a whole science of how natural sunlight differs from leds (and its biological effect) and how to recreate it. I believe SAD lights try to replicate sunlight, but generally modern LEDs, even "warm" ones are missing key wavelengths and have a different profile from sun/sky light. There are now LEDs much closer to real sunlight, but they are also more expensive (though arguable not more so than knocking out more windows. What I'm surprised at is how rare fake windows/skylights are. I mean, such products/companies exist, but they seem to be relatively niche, and accordingly expensive (as in "call our sales team for pricing" expensive), not really ready for your usual DIY/domestic consumer. I think what we really need is monitor/TV companies producing low-res, high lumen screens for this purpose, hopefully mass produced. I think Sony has produced a "passive" screen ("the Frame") , that is effectively a matt tv mean to display slow/static images to replace hanging pictures (and even stuffs the electronics in the wall to keep a low profile), but it's still a luxury niche.
- kayodelycaon 1y ago
  My local IKEA has light boxes with a film sheet over them to make fake windows. They look surprisingly realistic.
  - Chris2048 1y ago
    yep, and for some reason they use them to sell blinds, but not the lightbox itself. I'm sure they'd sell like hotcakes.
- account42 1y ago
  Do "sunlight" LEDs even make sense? Why not use incandescents - they aren't inefficient if the IR spectrum is part of what you want.
emorning3 1y ago
>> But nothing has the quality of life impact of smart blinds << I have a ton of sleep problems and just wanna push back here a little... going for a brisk walk in the fresh air and sunshine every day works a lot better for me.
foo42 1y ago
curious if you have any more details on your hacked up smart dehumidifier?
tmaly 1y ago
any chance you have a smart dehumidifier?

threatofrain 1y ago

Could we hear more about your home automation stack? I'm looking to get into this myself.

joshvm 1y ago
Can't speak for OP, but just get Home Assistant running and play around. It'll work in Docker in anything, but it's a good use for an old Raspberry Pi. There isn't much more of a stack than that, and HA is by far the most polished OSS solution. It's got some sharp edges - every time I've done a major auto-update it's broken something critical. You can run it alongside other controllers like the Hue Bridge, which is nice to have as a backup (since 90% of what most people connect is smart lighting). Probably the most useful simple automation I have is an motion activated dim light in the bathroom at night, but that's using Hue. Then look at ESPHome, which is an ecosystem for making your own DIY sensors and controllers that can feed into HA. For example we have a Sensirion air quality sensor that triggers a smart switch connected to a fan if the particulate level gets high when cooking. You can go a very long way with on/off to control non-smart devices, and your sensors don't need to be particularly accurate (like absolute PM2.5) as long as the conditon you trigger on is repeatable. The only thing to think about is what hardware ecosystem makes sense for you. For example there's at least four different competing standards for connectivity (WiFi, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter/Thread, etc). So getting a Zigbee dongle isn't a bad idea because then you can connect any IKEA or Hue device (among others).
- asdefghyk 1y ago
  RE ".....if the particulate level gets high when cooking ....." What is the particale counter level you use ? The number ? Just curious.
  - joshvm 1y ago
    If over 100 ug/m3 for 2 minutes, turn on, if under 10 for 10, turn off. If someone's cooking, there is a very predictable spike that peaks in the low hundreds and then decays (super-) exponentially. It was surprising to see how long it takes to get back to ambient. I think you'd have to cook a steak with the stove extractor off to hit 1000 and our hard-wired smoke alarm would definitely be going off. I have no idea how absolutely accurate the SEN55 is, but the background level is usually below 5. I don't live in a particularly polluted place, so that seems reasonable. NOx is almost always zero.
- Larrikin 1y ago
  Home Assistant is nice for this crowd in that you can actually use a real programming language to do the automations. I went with PyScript but NodeRed is very popular as well. No need for YAML
  - mikepurvis 1y ago
    Can you? I should give it another try. I remember giving it a look a few years ago and it looked like a considerable amount of the setup was going to take place through a web GUI and then be persisted in its internal database. For a server I have to maintain over time, I'd rather things be as stateless as possible so that the cost of doing a scripted redeploy is basically zero.
    - theshrike79 1y ago
      PyScript runs inside HA and IIRC the Python in it has some quirks because of it. AppDaemon[0] runs alongside it and is more "real" Python, it mostly just responds to events sent to it. NodeRED has a direct integration and is (in my experience) best for complex state machines as you can easily debug them and actually see the logic work. They also have a REST API to trigger things and a Websocket API if you need more real-time stuff (subscribing to events instead of querying states) Then there is just straight up MQTT, where you need to do it all yourself. What HA shines is that it tends to have ready-made community integrations with _everything_. And enough users for each that if something breaks, people will notice and it'll be fixed promptly. [0] https://github.com/AppDaemon/appdaemon https://github.com/AppDaemon/appdaemon
J_Shelby_J 1y ago
The home assistant $100 stand alone device. Pretty seamless user experience. On par with what you would expect for a consumer device as far as UX. Maybe could be a bit more polished but you can do pretty much anything with it as far extending the ecosystem. My only complaint is that writing automations in untyped yaml sucks. Fortunately, if you dump the docs in an LLM it can one shot most things - if you’re trying to do something the gui automation tool doesn’t support. The rest is zigbee and zwave switches and sensors. You can get cheap ones from ikea. You can get nicer ones from Zooz. I like Apollo for air quality sensors. The humidifier is the German brand Ventura. Zero maintenance. But it’s not smart so I got a power outlet that reports power usage. When it runs out of water the humidifier shuts off and the power goes to zero, so I have an automation that detects that and sends a message via the HA app. Living in California and having fans move air around from cool rooms to warmer rooms has cut our AC bill significantly as a dc fan is a fraction of power consumption of a whole house AC. And also co2 levels stay much lower. Last week I set up my window fan to blow air in whenever it’s cooler outside then inside.
scotty79 1y ago
I think you can read about OP's automation stack here: https://sifter.org/~simon/journal/20240412.html https://sifter.org/~simon/journal/20240412.html

seanalltogether 1y ago

Automated blinds can also have a good effect on temperature control. In the summer you can have your south facing blinds automatically close when you leave the house to block out the sun.

Spivak 1y ago
So that's a funny thing, your blinds are on the inside of your house so the sun energy is hitting them and dissipating from there. Hopefully your blinds are white and reflecting more of it out than the other surfaces it would otherwise hit. But if you want to make a real temperature difference you need blinds on the other side of the insulated box otherwise known as an awning.
- FreebasingLLMs 1y ago
  [dead]
- blacksmith_tb 1y ago
  The only tricky part being that it's desirable to limit the amount of sun shining into the house in the warmer months, but not the cooler ones. Awnings that fold or are otherwise removable are a reasonable solution, there are also sunshades which mount outside, and also use a spinning rod to raise and lower (if the electronics and motor here could be weatherproofed a little they might be quite usable).
  - asdefghyk 1y ago
    Having the blind close to the window and covering at least a extra 6 inches or 15 cm band around edge of window significantly reduces light spillage into the room, when the blind is down, in my experience.
  - scotty79 1y ago
    In cooler months the sun is lower over the horizon so the awning block less of it.

foobarian 1y ago

The blinds shown under this article are pretty ordinary vinyl type blinds that leak a ton of light. I wish I could find blinds thick enough to behave like cardboard over windows, that could also be opened on a daily cadence. At this point I gave up on blinds and put a shirt over my eyes to sleep. I thought about just covering the windows permanently but I don't relish that idea.

ojame 1y ago
Not sure what country you're from, but "blockout blinds" are likely what you're looking for. They blockout (essentially) all light and are operated like normal blinds.
- danielheath 1y ago
  Have never seen blockout blinds which stop enough light during the day - they leak enough to be comparable to a reading lamp, since outdoors is so bright.
  - sokka_h2otribe 1y ago
    Mounted internal to the window frame, not external, works better for me. Internal can ride tighter to the window, so light can't go out the edges. With external frame mounting, you need much wider shades. If the fabric itself isn't blocking light... You need better material. I have only ever had problem with light leakage in the edges, not in the fabric material. I believe 'blackout thermal shades' is what to look for.
  - theoreticalmal 1y ago
    Do you sleep during the day typically?
  - zrobotics 1y ago
    I used to work night shift and tried a few different things. Maybe the super-premium blinds block more light, but IME the most effective solution is blackout curtains. You'll need to hang a curtain rod that's wider than the window and get curtains that are wide enough, ideally just a single curtain rather than 2 if your window is narrow enough.

seanmcdirmid 1y ago

Ya, it’s especially nice if you have a lot of windows and want to open or close them all at once. Lutron blinds were the first improvement we made to the house and was a no brainer even at the highish price we paid.

TimByte 1y ago

There's just something about waking up to actual sunlight (even filtered through clouds) that no amount of artificial brightness can replicate. It's like your brain knows the difference.

05 1y ago
Indoor lighting is about two orders of magnitude dimmer, you’d need 1kW/m*2 (100W/sqft) to emulate a cloudless day at noon, so 20kW just to light up your living room, not accounting for LED losses.
- adrianN 1y ago
  You can get away with less because a good part of the power is outside the visible range.
  - bitdivision 1y ago
    Apparently 42% is visible! Less than I expected. So around 470 W/m2 visible radiation.
- TimByte 1y ago
  No wonder a walk outside wakes you up better than a pot of coffee

Chris2048 1y ago

There's a whole science of how natural sunlight differs from leds (and its biological effect) and how to recreate it. I believe SAD lights try to replicate sunlight, but generally modern LEDs, even "warm" ones are missing key wavelengths and have a different profile from sun/sky light. There are now LEDs much closer to real sunlight, but they are also more expensive (though arguable not more so than knocking out more windows. What I'm surprised at is how rare fake windows/skylights are. I mean, such products/companies exist, but they seem to be relatively niche, and accordingly expensive (as in "call our sales team for pricing" expensive), not really ready for your usual DIY/domestic consumer. I think what we really need is monitor/TV companies producing low-res, high lumen screens for this purpose, hopefully mass produced. I think Sony has produced a "passive" screen ("the Frame") , that is effectively a matt tv mean to display slow/static images to replace hanging pictures (and even stuffs the electronics in the wall to keep a low profile), but it's still a luxury niche.

kayodelycaon 1y ago
My local IKEA has light boxes with a film sheet over them to make fake windows. They look surprisingly realistic.
- Chris2048 1y ago
  yep, and for some reason they use them to sell blinds, but not the lightbox itself. I'm sure they'd sell like hotcakes.
account42 1y ago
Do "sunlight" LEDs even make sense? Why not use incandescents - they aren't inefficient if the IR spectrum is part of what you want.

emorning3 1y ago

>> But nothing has the quality of life impact of smart blinds << I have a ton of sleep problems and just wanna push back here a little... going for a brisk walk in the fresh air and sunshine every day works a lot better for me.

foo42 1y ago

curious if you have any more details on your hacked up smart dehumidifier?

tmaly 1y ago

any chance you have a smart dehumidifier?