After a few Amazon orders, I was able to lay the foundation for a home automation setup by installing a hub. Otherwise, I made progress on my DnD template to reduce the time taken for set up and took a crack at some programming.
Home Assistant Up and Running
Let’s start with the concrete progress from the week.
I gained ground when it comes to home automation. I dug out an old Raspberry Pi to use as an automation hub. The hub serves as a control center for automation systems. I’ve gone with Home Assistant, because it’s a local system and is extremely flexible. With that piece of techin place, I can slowly build up automation options over time. As of now, the place I’ve started with is lighting
The consensus for lighting favors the use of smart light switches, but since I’m renting, rewiring light switches isn’t something I’m prioritizing now. I kept my initial goal simple. to remotely switch a lamp on and off. Once that system was set up, I added some minor automation based on the sunset and even a bedtime alert if I’m up too late. Currently, the alert just flashes the lights at 11:00 PM if the lamp is still on, which is all the nudge I need to start getting ready for bed. As with all things in smart home tech, I also have a grand vision for an improved system in mind.
With my primary goal complete, I have a few more lighting based ideas for the short term. One is to put a light strip under my bed for a dim light at night for when the even the dim lamp is too much. In a totally different part of the house, there is a set of shelves that lead to the basement. Due to their positioning, they are often poorly lit. With just a light strip with a built-in motion sensor, it could perfectly light up the shelf, as well as be an improved lead to the basement.
The major barrier at this point is cost, as I don’t want to sink a whole bunch of money into these options all at once. A benefit of home automation is it can be built over time, and every addition can lead to exponential options for tying different tech together.
One of the takeaways I’ve had in the project this week is to have a long term plan, but to start specific. The long term planning is largely creating the foundation for future additions, much like the base of any structure. However, it can be easy to get carried away with the plan and not get anything done. Having specific goals in mind to get started can help get the ball rolling.
Something Software this Way Comes
The major focus this week was on getting Home Assistant up and running, but I was able to spend some time in other areas.
The only progress I’ve made on my improvements to DnD planning was to add some existing tools I use directly to my existing template. Goblinist was the biggest one, as this will allow me to quickly generate a few options for random encounters, even on the fly mid session without much hassle. This certainly does save me a few clicks, but I still see plenty of room for improvement. My vision is being able to click on a few buttons directly within the template and it spits out similar options as Goblinist, but also includes the actual monster info directly into Notion.
An area that saw a questionable level of progress was setting up automated payments in Venmo. I looked at some other payment platform options that offered built in scheduling, but I wanted to avoid having my roommate sign up for new things. I was able to utilize an existing project to get the code almost working, however after 2 hours I was still dealing with some errors. I’m hoping after jumping through some verification hoops with Venmo, I might get this wrapped up. While I am spending far more time than I ever will clicking the few buttons needed to send a payment, I find three major benefits to automating this.
First, I don’t need to take the time to think about sending what I owe each month, something I’ve forgotten several days into the month at times. Second, I can always adjust the process for anyone or anything willing to accept Venmo for payments. Finally, it’s been a great learning experience. While I’m largely borrowing from existing code, working through the changes I need to get my process to work is forcing me to learn a lot about the technical structure of the service.
With just about a week left in this focus on automation, I’m going to focus on systems to speed up the writing of these posts. I’ll be going on a trip soon and want to have posts up and ready without much interruption.
Trying Out Before Buying In 