Automations that almost cost me divorce

The phrase I’ve heard most about my wife in these years is «the house is not a toy». And you can’t imagine the bronzes I’ve had at home for these years because of some automation that has not worked the right way or some wrong idea. You are reading these lines for the same reason that I write them: we like technology. But at home we are not always surrounded by people with the same ‘appetite’ of technology as us and, in some cases, resistance to change can be important, so today I want to tell you some automations that almost cost me the divorce.. And s

In some cases the device (the least) has failed, but in others the problem was a concept error or a poorly configured automation.

It’s been a long way.

The current moment of home-compatible domestics is far from the state in which everything was found when I got involved with this xD shit. I’ve told you before, but the first bridge of Aqara that I bought that was the m1 at that time was not even compatible with HomeKit the integration came later via firmware update… and much less the firmware was updated and we simply saw the devices in the App House, but we had to rematch them, the automations were lost, some were not compatible… a drama.

In addition, The beginning of the Home App had nothing to do with the app you see now.. The integration with shortcuts that now allows us to introduce conditionals and complex automations did not reach until iOS 13 (a couple of years ago at the time of writing this entry), so the functionality was very limited. Imagine for example that it was not possible to have a button to turn on a bulb and that the same button would turn it off when you pressed it back! The button just lit the bulb and if you wanted to turn it off, you had to go to the Home App.

Back then, Some of us started using the Home + app that we’ve ever talked about and that did allow this type of condition. Although it has always cost a lot of money… but we could create conditioned automations and join devices with each other… for example, if the Aqara temperature sensor (the HomeKit compatible version, not that of Xiaomi that was not) went down from X temperature, from the App House you could not do anything because it simply showed the temperature that came from the sensor, but was not able to read it, I didn’t know what temperature it marked, and therefore you couldn’t automate anything… you had the data as a monitor and little more. Yeah.

No embargo from Home + you could read this data and act accordingly, so you could turn on the heater with a HomeKit-compatible plug in case the Aqara sensor went down to X degrees.

Anyway, as you can intubate, getting to the present moment has not been easy… for us or for people living under the same roof.

Automation failure

– The song of the dwarfs: As you know, I have four children like four suns. It’s not always easy to coordinate them for day-to-day tasks like getting up, lying down, going out of the house, sitting at the table to eat… so a few months ago I created an automation so that when it comes time to put on the jackets, take the backpacks and put on the masks (between weeks, at 8: 45 and only when there’s someone at home), the lights of the common areas, those of their rooms (which is where they usually are before they leave the house), are turned off and on and sound quickly and by the HomePod of the house.

s / album / hi-ho-de-la-pelicula-white-eves-y-les-siete-enanitos / 213709775? i = 213709980 «rel =» noopener «target =» _ blank «> the song of the Snow White Dwarfs, which they sing when they go to work at the mine. What’s cool?

The problem is that I didn’t condition that automation to a holiday calendar, and a holiday Monday we didn’t have to get up early, the song was set to sound all over the palette while the lights in the house were on and off. All very scary when you’re sleeping.

– Updating of Philips Hue devices: Currently, the Philips Hue app allows you to select the time at which the home devices are to be updated in case there is a firmware update available. A few versions ago did not have this parameter, so the lights were updated as a new version of firmware was released. Philips already notices in its app that the lights should be correctly connected to the electric current (even if they are off) and that they may blink during the update process.

And indeed, a night that I was on a trip (before the COVID was traveling a lot) and some light bulbs were updated at night, turning on 100% power to then stay in a «candle» mode… or that’s what my wife said when she called me to yell at me at 4: 00 in the morning.

– Aqara switches with delay: This story I have told you recently since it has cost me a few months (and many euros) to solve it… and it has not even been completely solved, but it has been minimized enough. The case is that for a few days the Aqara switches were late. I don’t know if it was because I had the original bridge of Aqara, the m1, and it was already older… or if I had many connected devices or if the problem was that the bridge was set up in the China area… but the case is that when you touched the switch so the light would turn on they could pass perfectly 5 or 6 safe, sometimes more.

Imagine the chaos… when someone was going to enter a room, it’s normal for you to push the switch as you go in. Well, in this case, you looked in the middle of the room in the dark. And as the light didn’t turn on, you would press the switch again, so sometimes the first command (turn on) came in and instantly turned off, so you would turn it back on… and all this time you were in the dark. I was very upset and there were times when I was directly asking the voice assistant, but the rest of the house or the visits seemed to be working out and that ‘that thing about domestics is shit’.

– €480 in heating: A Easter holiday we went to visit the grandparents in Valencia. Once there, we met some friends to spend the day and came up with the theme of compatible domestics, so I ran as an expert and taught them how from 400km away I could turn on the boiler of my house, which you know was one of the first automations I did. And yes, the boiler turned on and started to rise the temperature at home. I immediately turned it off again.

The fact is that I had not set up any rule of presentiality or geo-positioning or maximum temperature that the house should reach before the boiler was turned off… and when I pressed back the domestic plug that fed the boiler in the Home App, the pelotilla remained spinning and then put ‘No response’. I didn’t give it any more turns and I thought it would be app failure by being connected by 4G and that the command would have arrived correctly (it was that the App House also failed before and showed everything as’ No answer ‘! the app had to be closed and opened and sometimes it worked after doing this and again showed the real state of everything.

Indeed, the boiler was turned on without any control throughout Holy Week. When we came home and walked in the door, we already noticed that it was’ too good ‘. $480 of gas cost me the nonsense.

– The police under the house: I don’t know if you’ve ever set up the Aqara bridge to do the alarm functions. We’ve talked about it around here, We even have an entrance to get the sound out of the HomePod and to hear it louderBut it’s one of the main functions of the bridge. You simply configure one of your sensors as the door opening or the motion so that, once the alarm is in ‘Armed’ state, it starts to sound if the door is opened or something moves inside of ca

sa. The sound is also configurable, you can choose between several, and I thought I’d set up the sound of a police siren. That would fucking make any shit run off.

The thing is, I created an automation so that when there was no one at home, the alarm from Aqara would be set. And I went to work. My wife wasn’t home either, so NADA could go wrong. When one of the two phones entered the area, the alarm would be disarmed.

You won’t believe it, my son came back early than planned and my wife ran out of battery on her cell phone. When they entered the house the police siren began to sound, but as the sound of the Aqara bridge is not too strong they thought the police were passing through the street. At a time it stopped, but the motion sensor was redetected when they were passing through the entrance and again ringing. My wife says they were lying in the window half-morning without understanding what was going on and without seeing anything weird. Another tan. Something like my kids’ kangaroo happened to me, that story I tell you another day… but who can think of not having an iPhone that I can

add to the Home App to know when someone’s home?!

Failure in the idea or concept

– Movement sensor in the bathroom: Again fighting with my four children! It is very common to leave the light on when they enter the bathroom. I don’t know why, but they always leave without turning off the light. That switch. is an intelligent switch from Aqara on a condition that when they light the light at night because someone gets up in the bathroom, it only lights it up by 40% and then automatically turns it off at 5 minutes, as at night they are sometimes so asleep that they forget to turn it off. Okay. But

And during the day? I can’t automatically turn off the light because sometimes you go in to shower or shave or whatever, but it can be more than 5 minutes… so I thought I’d put an Aqara motion sensor on so that the light would automatically turn off when I didn’t detect movement. This way, when my kids got out of the bathroom, they didn’t even have to worry about turning off the light, but if they turned it off better.

The thing is, my wife went in to shower in the bathroom of the babies and, at the close of the screen, the motion sensor stopped detecting it, so the light was off. Imagine her by taking her arm out over the breast and shaking it so that the sensor could detect it (which was not easy because she is very facing the ground and in a corner to prevent it from turning on when someone passes by the bathroom door). And all this while making me understand her discomfort and total disapproval of automation in that sweet way that only women have… she ripped off the sensor that was stuck with double-sided tape as soon as she left the shower, I’m not telling you anymore.

– Reset the bulb by pressing 7 times: Jajajajaja, I put the title of Fail automation and I’m already laughing. When I replaced all the light bulbs of the house with the very expensive light bulbs of Philips Hue wanted to take advantage of them in all their splendor. It had automations of those of ‘Wake up in the savannah’ so that the lights would play with the tones and intensities during the minutes of awakening and so the awakening was more natural and pleasant. In addition, at night, only 50% of its intensity was lit in warm tones. A whole deployment of automations and conditions.

You know what happens to a smart bulb when it’s off and the current is cut off from a non-domotic switch… it doesn’t turn on because it has no current. If you give the switch back to the switch it’s still unlit, it already has current but its condition is’ off ‘, so it’s still off. You and I see it clear, but the rest of the house or the visits?

One night, my little daughter started crying, so we ran into her room. My wife pushed me right to enter the room first, so the first thing she did half-asleep is to press the switch… and indeed, the light didn’t turn on but ran out of power. He went back in his footsteps to give him back… and nothing. Imagine my panic face while I was looking at the Apple Watch the Home App to light the bulb? By then there wasn’t even the HomePod! After giving the switch several times, the Philips bulb reset (the state is reset on / off fast 7 times in a row) and light by

So my wife ran to the cradle for the baby.

Then I tried to cover up and say, «Good thing it’s okay, what do I scare, huh?» but it didn’t work out… ‘Tomorrow I want all that out of my house, and I don’t take it away now for not waking the other kids. ‘.

I probably have a lot of other situations that I’ve left in the tintero. I haven’t told you how many times everything has been disconfigured (it used to happen from time to time with the Aqara bridge when the firmware was updated), or when the light has gone out for any reason that you can’t turn on anything until the router lifts the wifi and the Aqara bridge reconnects with the devices… but you know, when your partner is complaining because the light of the balcony has been on during the day or because the blinds have not been automatically lowered so that the crystals don’t get dirty even though today they give it rain, send it this entrance.

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