Devices or environments in automations?

During the Home Consulting I learn a lot. It’s supposed to be a service to help those who want to start taming the house to automate some actions, just buy a house and want to ride everything from the beginning or people who are going to make a reform and want to know where to put the light points for motorized blinds and what is the best solution to automate this. There are also people with vision problems as I told you the other day. The point is that I see a lot of different use cases and needs of the most picturesque and surreal, I have already told you about the ‘Hey Lola, love me!’ of my friend Luis.

A pretty common problem I find with automations is that we don’t usually create environments but we create automation directly… and this is a mistake. I’ll explain why.

Let’s see, not that it’s a serious mistake, but creating an environment is more optimal. It is true that a few years ago, when third-party applications such as Control for HomeKit, Home + started to come out, the application of the Eve devices that has always worked very well to interact with all of the Home devices, etc, if you created a scene or environment directly from these apps you could not customize the name, thus generating a super long ID that if you saw it from the House app it was super ugly. An environment with a name that could be FE45-GHRKGU78-MSJG9. To ask Siri for that. Since the app you created it, it looked good, but in the ap

p House was seen with that ID… and in the end, it fucks us or not, many of us still use the Home app to visualize the status of the devices and throw things because it’s much prettier than the rest.

But this has not been the case for years, huh? Third-party apps like Controller for HomeKit we’ve talked about so many times work perfectly and we can create any type of environment or automation. Well, almost any guy, remember that Apple still has «kidnapped ‘some of its own devices and for example it is not possible to create a scene from Controller for Homeit that includes HomePods You have to create those directly from the Home app or from the shortcuts.

Creating an environment rather than including the devices we want within an automation also has other advantages. In the end, automation is going to launch that environment and, if we need to modify it, we will do it exactly the same in both cases, but we tend to create different automations by groups of devices and in the end it is easier to create an environment or scene than to create 10 automations to light lights, adjust blinds, put music, etc. In addition, when we add new devices, we simply have to add them in the corresponding environment rather than modify all the necessary automations.

In my case I have a lot of environments. Good morning, good night, I go to the shower, etc. I like to create environments with friendly names because so we can ask Siri easily, which we can’t do with automations unless we turn them into a shortcut. It’s much more ‘user-friendly ‘ Tell Siri ‘Hey Lola, get out of the house’ to tell him to lower the blinds, turn off the lights and set the alarm on.

But it’s not just for comfort, it’s also for efficiency because the scenes or environments are somewhat faster than the automations, because by activating a scene all the devices included receive the command simultaneously, while an automation commands the commands sequentially. It is true that it can be invaluable, but the scene is more effective and has less latency.

Related to what we said before asking Siri or the voice assistant to have, you have to keep in mind that a scene we can run when we want. For example, the good night that I told you earlier is that I turn off the lights, put down the blinds on the terrace, set the boiler in the temperature we want for the night and close the door with a key… but this is that I can want to run it any other time, for example in a moment of passion with the couple! If you’re in the living room and you get a passion outburst any time, you can ask Siri ‘Good night’ or you can also have a

I don’t have to ask you to put the blinds down, to turn off the lights, to close the door so that no one of my children can come in, and to put the boiler down because you’re going to be hot enough to get the boiler on top… or to say that the good night environment I run it many times, many times a week! Jajajaja, my desire, I’d like to, thank God my wife doesn’t listen to this podcast.

The use of scenes tends to ‘reduce’ automations. It is quite common for us to have, for example, several automations at the same time. I, for example, had several automations for the ‘good day’ that I told you earlier, so at 8: 15 in the morning that’s when my kids get up I had an automation for the music that I’ve told you once, another for the lights, another for the boiler that fits in ‘dress’ mode and it increases the temperature for when they take off their pajamas… and all the same hour! And of course, I could create a cojo- automation with all those devices, but since these are things I was adding little by little because

they stayed in different automations. You can imagine the mess when I integrated the holiday calendar as I had to put a condition in each of them to check whether that day was festive even though it was between weeks and then run or not automation. However with an environment it is much easier as you only have to do it once.

This isn’t just for HomeKit, huh? Home Assistant goes exactly the same, also at Home Assistant is much clearer because when you create an automation you see it sequentially, so it is more obvious that you will run one command after another. I have a friend, Antonio, who is a co-worker who is Super Sayan level in queue management… he could leave it here and it would be funny, but Antonio knows a lot about MQTT, so he runs the scenes and automations directly over MQTT entities… this makes you just as much as you change a bulb in the room because it’s fused, he associates the new bulb to that MQTT entity or I know,

the plug that has been bought to turn on and off the Christmas tree, and it does not have to change anything in the scene or automation, which is much faster to manage. Let’s see if I mess with him one day and get him over here, he just thinks about running and doing the fucking sport.

I hope this article will be useful to you. if you are taking a turn at the automations after this week’s Home Assistant break with the Zigbee2MQTT plugin, which I don’t know if you know but have been covered with glory… have decided to change a lot of parameters of the configuration and not to make it retro- compatible, so at the beginning of the week we had general panic all we used zigbee2mqtt as we had all the devices disconnected. I had to change things in the zigbee2mqtt configuration, other colleagues from the Telegram group had to change the actions within the automations because the left click has passed

or a left action… the case is that people are happy as you can imagine. See? This isn’t about HomeKit. In my case, after the initial panic moment, I’ve had the collateral damage that one of my switches has no longer been able to make it work, I don’t know if it’s taken advantage of to break it or if it’s still failing something on the link with zigbee2mqtt, but it gives me that I’m going to remove it and put a Shelly behind the conventional switch and fly. By the way, I also have news from Shelly about Matter, but I’ll tell you about those next week. Well well well, what a exciting start of the year.

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