House Smarty

It’s 2020. You know, the year with the fires, pandemic, murder hornets, and more fires. There’s a pandemic forcing millions of employees to work from home. I’m fortunate to have a dedicated home office to work out of and various family members are always dropping by to say hi. I love being able to see my family so often! Except when I’m on a work call. And until recently, my family’s way of determining if I was on a call was to barge into my office yelling, “Are you on a call?”. And I would have to gesture off-camera to my headset while maintaining a completely neutral face or fumble for the mute button to answer them that, yes, I am on a call. You’d think the closed door and large Jabra 75 headset covering my ears would be clue enough but, alas, my family requires something a little less subtle. Something along the lines of a flashing, bright red “on-air” sign used by TV studios.

As I shared in the previous post , my system was running Home Assistant but talking to my devices through the cloud integration to SmartThings. Node-RED was able to respond to events and turn lights and or off (in HA-land, this is referred to as “calling a service”) but these automations were not yet running locally due to the integration with SmartThings. My next task was to start moving devices over from SmartThings to the Home Assistant Z-Wave integration.