Daniel's prompt this week is a love letter to the moment every Home Assistant user knows. Months in, you're looking at two unrelated integrations, and then the penny drops. Wait, if the doorbell is already an entity, and the media player is already an entity, then the doorbell could trigger the media player. And then the evening is gone.
And he wants the list. The ten most gloriously unnecessary automations, ranked and argued over. Some real folklore, some inventions, and he wants us to say which is which because that distinction is most of the joke. For each one, the actual build. Which integration, which trigger, which sensor, and the janky template you'd regret writing.
He also wants the trap pointed at. The one or two that start dumb and quietly become indispensable. And a couple of pranks. Household scale, affectionate, reversible. Nothing that locks anyone out or soaks anyone.
And then the unresolved question. Is this a healthy way to spend a life? He says argue about it. Do not resolve it.
So we built the list. We argued about the ranking. We did not resolve the life question.
Home Assistant is the only consumer software category where the platform is powerful enough to let you build something spectacularly dumb. And that's not a criticism. It's the point.
The entity model. Everything becomes a uniform entity with a state and attributes. A light, a temperature sensor, a boolean helper you made up at two in the morning, a template that calculates something nobody asked for. All the same shape. And once everything is the same shape, any entity can trigger any other entity. There's no product manager telling you no.
That's the thing commercial smart home platforms never understood. They give you a curated set of triggers and actions. If this motion sensor, then that light. Home Assistant gives you the whole graph. You can have a humidity sensor trigger a text-to-speech announcement on a speaker in a different room, but only if a calendar entry says it's a weekday and a template says the washing machine has been running for more than forty minutes.
And the space between why would you do that and how would you do that. That's where the hobby lives. The why is often absent. The how is always fascinating.
Which is why the ranking criteria matter. We're scoring on engineering effort to pointlessness ratio. Realness, whether it's actual community folklore or something we invented. And the trap factor. The chance that the stupidest thing on the list is the one you still use two years later.
Let's get to the list. We ranked them. We argued. We did not agree on everything.
Number ten. The doorbell wired to a stadium goal horn. This one is real. There's a GitHub repo, GoalHorn by dennyreiter. The build is a doorbell sensor, a media player integration, and a sound file of a hockey goal horn. Someone rings the doorbell, and your living room sounds like a game-winning overtime goal.
The janky part is the latency. Doorbell press to horn blast. You're aiming for the Pavlovian response, but what you get is a half-second delay while the media player wakes up, buffers the file, and then blasts it. The delivery driver is already back in the van by the time the horn goes off.
And the first time it fires at two in the morning because a cat walked past the motion sensor. That's the moment you learn about conditions. Time conditions, specifically. The repo probably doesn't mention the cat.
Number nine. The mailbox sensor that pings a phone in another country. Also real folklore. A door and window sensor on the mailbox flap. When the flap opens, the automation sends a notification through the companion app or Telegram. The recipient is on another continent and cannot do anything about the mail.
The engineering effort is trivial. A contact sensor, a notification action. Maybe fifteen minutes of setup. The pointlessness is the entire point. You're in Jerusalem, the mailbox is in Connecticut, and now you know the mail arrived. You were going to know that when you got home anyway.
But here's the trap. That same sensor becomes a package theft deterrent. If the mailbox opens at three in the morning, you get a notification immediately. You can't do anything from another country, but you know. And knowing is apparently worth the sensor.
Number eight. The toilet visit dashboard. Also real, posted across the community. A door sensor on the bathroom door, a template binary sensor for occupancy, and a Lovelace dashboard with history graphs. You can see exactly how many times the bathroom was used, for how long, and at what time of day.
The janky part is distinguishing a shower from a toilet visit. You need a humidity sensor and a template that nobody should ever read. If the door is closed and the humidity rises above a threshold, it's a shower. If the door is closed and the humidity stays flat, it's a toilet visit. The template ends up being thirty lines of Jinja with nested conditions and edge cases for the fan being on.
And the dashboard is beautiful. Graphs, statistics, averages. Someone spent an entire weekend building a data visualization of their household's bathroom habits. That's the hobby in one project.
Number seven. The Zigbee connected everything. Real folklore. The person who put a Zigbee button on their kettle. The sensor on the toilet roll holder that reports remaining paper. The engineering effort is real. The problem it solves was already solved by eyesight.
The toilet roll sensor is my favorite. You can look at the roll and see how much paper is left. But instead, someone installed a sensor, probably a contact sensor or a distance sensor, and wired it into the mesh. Now the dashboard shows toilet paper levels. The battery life on a sensor that reports every roll change is the janky part. And the Zigbee mesh stability when you add device number forty-seven.
The mesh is the silent killer. Every device you add routes traffic for every other device. At some point you're not adding sensors, you're adding routers. The kettle button is now responsible for relaying the bathroom humidity sensor's data to the coordinator.
Number six. The lamp that dims one percent per minute during a guest's visit. This one is our invention. A guest connects to the Wi-Fi, presence detection via the router integration triggers, and a lamp in the guest room starts dimming. One percent per minute. Over an hour, the room gets noticeably darker. Over three hours, they're sitting in near darkness wondering if the bulb is dying.
The engineering is a presence detection integration, a time-based template that calculates minutes since guest arrival, and an automation that runs every minute. The janky part is the single line of Jinja that maps minutes since arrival to a brightness percentage. It's a line of code that should never be read aloud, and yet it's the whole project.
The template takes the current time, subtracts the guest's connection time, divides by sixty, and maps that to a brightness value between two hundred fifty-five and zero. It's elegant and horrifying. And the guest never knows why the room got dark. They just leave slightly unsettled.
Number five. The smart speaker that sighs when someone opens the fridge after eleven at night. Real adjacent. Variations posted across the community. A door sensor on the fridge, a time condition, and a text-to-speech announcement that plays a sighing sound. Maybe a disappointed voice saying really, again.
The engineering is trivial. A contact sensor, a media player, a TTS service. The joy is in the household scale affectionate prank. It's not mean. It's just the house expressing mild disappointment.
The janky part is twofold. The fridge door sensor needs to be magnetically shielded from the fridge's own magnets, otherwise it reads as open when it's closed, or closed when it's open, or some quantum superposition of both. And the TTS delay means the sigh comes after the fridge door is already open. You hear the door open, then a pause, then the sigh. The timing ruins the effect.
Number four. The room that detects occupancy and turns off the lights, but with a twist. It also plays a sad trombone when someone leaves a room they've been in for less than thirty seconds. Also our invention. A motion sensor, a timer, and a media player.
The point is shaming the household member who keeps walking into rooms and forgetting why. They walk in, the light comes on, they stand there, they realize they forgot what they came for, they walk out. And the room plays the sad trombone. Wah wah wah.
The engineering is a motion sensor triggering a light, a timer that starts on occupancy, and a condition that checks if occupancy ended within thirty seconds. If yes, the media player plays the trombone. The janky part is the timer reset logic. If someone walks in, walks out, walks back in, the timer needs to reset each time. And the sad trombone firing at three in the morning when someone gets up to use the bathroom.
Number three. The plant that texts you when it needs water. Real, but elevated. A capacitive soil moisture sensor on a houseplant, an automation that sends a notification when moisture drops below a threshold. The plant becomes an entity. The plant has a state. The plant is thirsty.
And here's the trap. You start with one plant. Then you buy a second soil moisture sensor. Then a third. Then you have a soil moisture Zigbee network and a dashboard that tracks the hydration of every plant in the house. The plants are all entities. The dashboard shows a graph of soil moisture over time. You can see the exact moment each plant got watered.
The capacitive sensors are the right choice. The resistive ones corrode over time and give you readings that drift. Capacitive ones last longer, but they need calibration for each plant's soil type. The janky part is the calibration. You end up with a template that maps raw sensor values to actual soil moisture percentages, and it's different for every plant.
Number two. The morning routine that starts the coffee maker, but only if you've actually woken up. Real adjacent. A bed occupancy sensor, either a pressure mat or a smart bed, an automation that waits until you're out of bed and the bedroom door has opened before triggering the smart plug on the coffee maker.
The engineering is a template binary sensor for actually awake, combining the bed sensor state and the door sensor state. If the bed sensor says empty and the door sensor says open, you're awake. If the bed sensor says occupied, you're not. The janky part is the pressure mat false positives when the cat sleeps on the bed.
The cat is a person, as far as the pressure mat is concerned. The cat gets up, the bed sensor says empty, the door sensor hasn't opened, so the coffee maker doesn't trigger. But if the cat gets up and someone opens the bedroom door, the coffee maker fires. The cat has made coffee. The template needs a weight threshold, and now you're calibrating a pressure mat to distinguish a cat from a human.
Number one. The one that quietly became indispensable. The did I leave the garage door open automation. Real, the most common useful automation in the community. A door and window sensor on the garage door, an automation that checks at ten at night whether the door is open and sends a notification.
The engineering is trivial. A contact sensor, a time trigger, a notification action. Maybe twenty minutes of setup. The point is that it's the stupidest sounding idea. A sensor on a door. You can look at the door. You can see if it's open. But you don't look. You're in bed. The sensor looks for you.
And this is the trap. The dumbest idea on the list is the one you still use two years later. You're driving to work, and you get the notification. Garage door open. You turn around. You saved yourself a break-in, or a frozen pipe, or just the anxiety of not knowing. The sensor earned its keep in one afternoon.
So that's the list. But the list is not really the point. The point is what the list says about the hobby.
The entity model doesn't just permit dumb automations. It actively invites them. Once you've built a few, you start seeing everything as a potential entity. The mailbox is an entity. The toilet roll is an entity. The cat is, apparently, an entity if the pressure mat says so. The real world becomes a slow API, and you're just writing integrations for it.
The prank economy is a genre unto itself. The fridge sigh, the dimming lamp, the sad trombone. What makes them work is reversibility. A single automation toggle turns them off. The engineering is trivial. The design question is where the line is between funny and annoying.
And the line is different for every household. The fridge sigh is funny for about a week. Then it's annoying. Then you add a condition that only sighs on weekends. Then you add a condition that only sighs after midnight. Then you delete it. Then you miss it and rebuild it.
The useful trap is the pattern I keep coming back to. The soil moisture sensor, the garage door check, the mailbox ping. These start as jokes or experiments and become infrastructure. You build something dumb, live with it for a month, and discover it's solving a problem you didn't know you had.
The entity model makes that discovery process cheap. Adding a sensor is an afternoon, not a project. You don't need to file a change request with a product manager. You just add the entity and write the automation. If it's dumb, you delete it. If it's useful, you keep it. The cost of experimentation is so low that you experiment constantly.
And then there's the dark side. The evenings lost to template debugging. The Zigbee mesh that needs re-pairing at eleven at night. The spouse who asks why the lights flicker when the microwave runs. The hobby has a real cost in time and household patience.
The template debugging is the worst. You write a Jinja template that should work. It doesn't. You stare at it. You add a filter. It still doesn't work. You search the forums. Someone else had the same problem in 2021. The solution is a different syntax that does the same thing but works. You don't know why. You copy it. It works. You've lost an hour.
And the spouse acceptance factor. That's a real metric in the community. How many automations can you add before your spouse asks why the house is beeping at them. The answer is usually fewer than you'd like.
So the philosophical question. Is this a healthy way to spend a life? The argument for. It's creative engineering with immediate feedback. You build something, you see it work, you get the dopamine hit. It's tinkering in the tradition of ham radio and model trains. It teaches real skills. YAML, templating, networking, sensor physics. You learn how a capacitive sensor works because you needed to calibrate one for a plant.
The argument against. It's a black hole of time spent solving self-created problems. The platform churn means you're always maintaining rather than building. Home Assistant updates, an integration breaks, you spend a weekend fixing it. The household is a testing ground for things nobody asked for.
And the unresolved tension. The same platform that lets you build a stadium goal horn doorbell is the platform that lets you build a useful garage door alert. The stupidity and the utility are not in tension. They're the same impulse. The hobby is not about the automations. It's about the act of building them.
The community dimension matters too. The folklore is shared. The show off your favorite simple automation threads are the campfire stories. The GoalHorn, the mailbox ping, the toilet dashboard. These are the shared mythology that makes the hobby social. The inventions are plausible precisely because they're one integration away from being real.
That's why Daniel's prompt works. The distinction between real and invented is thin. The goal horn is real. The dimming lamp is invented. But they're both one afternoon away from existing. The space between why and how is the same space whether the thing is real or not.
The next time you add a sensor, will it be for something useful or something spectacularly dumb? And does the distinction even matter?
I've got a correction to the folklore. The real one isn't the goal horn or the mailbox sensor. It's the did I leave the iron on anxiety automation. I built one of those for every flat in a block I managed. Six flats, six irons, six automations.
Wait, you managed a block of flats?
Briefly. Property manager. I automated the communal laundry room with a door sensor and a smart plug so the washing machine would only run during off-peak electricity hours. Still proud of that one. But the iron automation was the mistake.
What went wrong?
The residents hated it. It would notify them at nine at night that the iron was still on, when they were deliberately leaving it out to cool. Every night. Six notifications. Six people annoyed. I had to add a cooling down grace period template that nobody should ever read. It checked whether the iron had been on in the last thirty minutes, and if so, assumed it was cooling and didn't notify. The template was forty lines.
You still run it?
A version of it. It checks whether I left the garage door open. It has saved me exactly once. But the one time it saved me was worth every false alarm since. I will never delete it.
I also once wired a doorbell to a stadium goal horn for one of the flats. The tenant moved out within a month. I don't think the horn was the reason, but I can't be sure.
The iron automation is a better example than the goal horn, honestly. The goal horn is a prank. The iron check is anxiety made into infrastructure. It's the same entity model, but pointed at a fear instead of a joke.
The grace period template. That's the janky part that makes it real. Nobody posts the grace period template on the forum. They post the simple version. The simple version doesn't work. The grace period version is the one that actually runs, and it's ugly.
The garage door check is the same shape. A sensor, a time trigger, a notification. But the difference is the garage door check solves a real problem. The iron check solves an imagined one. Most of the time the iron is fine. The garage door is sometimes actually open.
The one time it saved me, I was already in bed. The notification came through. Garage door open. I went out, closed it, went back to bed. Two minutes. If I hadn't had the sensor, the door would have been open all night. Maybe nothing would have happened. Maybe someone would have walked in and taken the tools. I don't know. The sensor cost twenty dollars and an afternoon. That's cheap insurance.
Where does that leave us? Right where we started, honestly. In the space between why and how. The next sensor you add will be for something. Maybe useful, maybe gloriously dumb. The distinction only becomes clear later.
The health question stays open. Is this a good way to spend a life? The space between why and how is where the hobby lives. Whether that's a good place to be is a question we're not going to answer today.
If you've built something gloriously unnecessary, we want to hear about it. If you've built something that started dumb and became indispensable, we especially want to hear about it.
Thanks to our producer, Hilbert Flumingtop.
This has been My Weird Prompts.
Email us at show at my weird prompts dot com. Tell us about the template you regret writing.
We'll be back soon.
