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Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#91

Post by greenleafjacob »

robk wrote: post #35

I run a Huginn server which has hundreds of recipes. Most scrape websites and send me updates either by pushover or email for things that matter -- news sites via rss with heavy keyword filtering for news that's important to me like hometown news etc (Google alerts style) -- firmware updates from various devices that wouldn't otherwise notify me like kindle -- posts up voted over X times in a period on smaller, speci…

Nice. I haven't quite jumped from IFTTT/Zapier to Huginn yet but this is something I plan to do as well. Have you compared it with beehive [1]?

[1] https://github.com/muesli/beehive

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#92

Post by AmericanChopper »

msangi wrote: post #86
AmericanChopper wrote: post #85

My AWS rep gave me one of their IoT buttons when those were first a thing. I wrote a couple of lambdas for it. One click would send an email to my boss telling him I was taking a sick day, double click would send him an email telling him I was running late.

Out of curiosity, how often are you using them?

I don’t use it at all anymore. But probably used it once or twice a month back then. If I woke up late I’d double click as soon as I got out of bed, or if I was having one of those days where I just cbf going to work I’d do the single click.

It took barely any time to set up a lambda to send an email, and I was mostly doing it to entertain myself with the novelty of it. But on the few occasions when I did, pushing a button and then going back to sleep instead of getting up for work was pretty sweet.

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#93

Post by robk »

greenleafjacob wrote: post #91
robk wrote: post #35

I run a Huginn server which has hundreds of recipes. Most scrape websites and send me updates either by pushover or email for things that matter -- news sites via rss with heavy keyword filtering for news that's important to me like hometown news etc (Google alerts style) -- firmware updates from various devices that wouldn't otherwise notify me like kindle -- posts up voted over X times in a period on smaller, speci…

Nice. I haven't quite jumped from IFTTT/Zapier to Huginn yet but this is something I plan to do as well. Have you compared it with beehive [1]? [1] https://github.com/muesli/beehive

Seems quite similar, albeit perhaps bit more extensible? I'm just comfortable w/ Huginn now and haven't had the need for anything else.

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#94

Post by ju-st »

isostatic wrote: post #57
adrianN wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They consume 10-20 Watts.

What are they doing? My 951 uses 3W maximum. https://mikrotik.com/product/RB951-2n

VDSL2 modem, DECT base station, USB port with external HDD, dual-band 4 stream Wifi radio

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#95

Post by roryisok »

spuz wrote: post #18

I built an accelerometer-based washing machine sensor which sends a notification to my phone when the washing is done. This is useful because the machine itself has no indication when it's done: http://www.instructables.com/id/Washing-Machine-Notification...

My machine has a time remaining feature which is great in theory but it's completely inaccurate. It might tell you there's 45 minutes left in a cycle, you'll come back an hour later and it'll say 17 minutes. I guess I know where the windows file-copy dialog author went to work after Microsoft

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#96

Post by dest »

t0mek wrote: post #23

I used DSP to recognize the commercials in the radio broadcast on my stereo receiver and turn down the volume automatically ("adblock for the radio broadcast"). I described it here: http://blog.rekawek.eu/2016/02/24/radio-adblock/

Great work! I have been working for a while on a similar adblock, but that does not need jingles to detect ads. I'm on my way to open source it. A radio player with adblocking included is available at https://www.adblockradio.com

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#97

Post by roryisok »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #92
msangi wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, how often are you using them?

I don’t use it at all anymore. But probably used it once or twice a month back then. If I woke up late I’d double click as soon as I got out of bed, or if I was having one of those days where I just cbf going to work I’d do the single click. It took barely any time to set up a lambda to send an email, and I was mostly doing it to entertain myself with the novelty of it. But on the few occasions when I did, pushing a…

I've never heard the shorthand cbf before but I can guess what it means :)

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#98

Post by roryisok »

lormayna wrote: post #54

I made a script that scrape many job offer websites and send a notification email when some custom rules match.

Nice, I was working on one to scrape remote job sites and send me relevant results to my inbox but I successfully got a new job before I finished it

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#99

Post by roryisok »

kungtotte wrote: post #69
yurishimo wrote: post #45

The lights in the most reasonably trafficked areas of my apartment are automated. The kitchen and bathroom mainly. If I'm in the kitchen I'm actively cooking or using the sink and pacing around, so the motion sensor keeps the lights on. After 1 minute of no motion, they turn off. Important to set timers though as the lights are no longer a reminder if something is in the oven or on the stovetop. For the bathroom, I h…

For the bath, couldn't you add a sensor that detects water level in the bath and use it to override the lights? Even something as simple as measuring the weight of the tub would work, and would simultaneously cover the shower cases too.

Measuring the weight of the tub doesn't sound simple. A camera or ultrasonic level meter would be easier to set up

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#100

Post by roryisok »

stevekemp wrote: post #51
yurishimo wrote: post #45

The lights in the most reasonably trafficked areas of my apartment are automated. The kitchen and bathroom mainly. If I'm in the kitchen I'm actively cooking or using the sink and pacing around, so the motion sensor keeps the lights on. After 1 minute of no motion, they turn off. Important to set timers though as the lights are no longer a reminder if something is in the oven or on the stovetop. For the bathroom, I h…

We have some battery-powered motion-detector LED lights about 1ft from the ground in our bathroom and hallway. Makes walking around late at night less painful. (Children's toys end up everywhere!)

Now that's clever. But I'd really love if someone would invent a kind of roomba that puts away toys
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