I agree! The pace things are moving has me very excited. I might need to brush the dust off my soldering iron so I can convert my 5+ nest speakers into something that is fully local and open source.

Mind sharing what you use for presence detection? Is that part of the switches you recommend?

Laundry notifications are absolutely critical for me, too. I live alone and my laundry room is in the basement, which I may not have a need to visit for many days. I was tired of forgetting to put wet clothes into the dryer and needing to re-wash.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to set up a reliable way to detect when the dryer cycle finishes. I ended up buying a cheap webcam and pointing it at the dryer so I can at least check the status remotely.

Love the cat one! That’s a unique take on home automation that I have never encountered before.

The ones I use the most are:

• Turning on lights and setting specific scenes when I turn on TVs in my bedroom, living room and theater room.
• Brighten lights whenever Plex is paused or finishes playing, which is great in a dedicated home theater where the lighting is very dark when watching a movie. This has actually helped improve many hang out nights with friends because the moment after a movie finishes is less awkward, leading more naturally into a nice conversation before every heads home.
• Reminder notifications for when washing machine or dryer cycles finish, or when my garage door has been open for more than 15 minutes (unless I override that with a toggle on my dashboard).
• Turning off all of my lights and switches when I leave the house, unless a boolean variable is flipped (e.g. if someone else is at my house w/o me, which is unusual since I live alone). Well, not quite everything, there are a few devices like a couple power monitoring smart pugs that always remain on.