LED strips and code

Ever since I moved, I wanted to replace my dumb heating thermostat with Home Assistant, because I would like to be able to turn the heating off when I go away for a few days, but mainly because it would be nice to be able to turn it on a few hours before coming back home. The new Home Assistant's thermostat card So, eventually I placed a few Xiaomi temperature sensors around the house, replaced the thermostat with a wifi relay, combined it all together with the Generic Thermostat component , but one important thing was missing: a way to schedule when the temperature should be set to high (comfort mode) or low (eco mode). In my dumb thermostat I was able to set an hourly schedule for each day of the week, since I don't want the heating to be running 24/7. Unfortunately, there is no component to do this in Home Assistant, but since we do have the Python Scripts component , I decided to write a simple Python script to handle my scheduling, along with a simple automation t...

I'm using  Home Asisstant  for about a year now, and this is one of those things that I wanted to add for a long time, but have been postponing it. Until a few days ago, when I've arrived home and found out that one of the lights was on all day. Actually, after checking the Home Assistant log, it was my cat that triggered a motion sensor, that turned the light on (more about cats and motion sensors in a future post). The basic idea here is that if I'm not at home for more than 30 minutes and a light is on (or turns on), I get a notification on my phone. For sending notifications from Home Assistant to my phone, I'm using the  Pushbullet component . I already had a group were I list all the controllable lights in the house and I wanted to be able to use this group directly in the automation, so I don't have to define every light in two separate places. Also, I want to be able to exclude some lights from triggering a notification (but I don't want to remo...