My home automation efforts are pretty modest so far, but address definite pain points in my house.

Not really automated at all, but there is a LED in the ceiling near the front door that flashes when the garage door is open[1]. Seeing that light when coming down the hall has saved us heaps of times from leaving the garage door open all night.

I also have laser pointers hanging from the ceiling in the garage that are positioned so when the laser dot reaches the dash you know the car is in far enough.

Another not quite automated addition is using a Sonoff wifi touch light switch[2] in the lounge room[3]. Reflashed with Tasmota it allows us to easily turn the overhead lights on and off from the same remote control for the TV, Amp and Kodi media player. (Works via a script in Kodi.)

Probably the handiest is using an ultrasonic distance sensor as a presence sensor to tell the computer when I’m in front of it or not[5]. If music is playing when I walk away from the computer, it pauses then resumes when I come back. Also wakes sleeping screens when I return.

Just recently I wrote a little script that displays the number of minutes I've been sitting at the computer in the corner of the screen. At thirty minutes it turns from green to red and plays, "Move it! Move it!" sound, which it'll keep doing every five minutes until I get up and leave the computer for a little bit. (Although I think I'm going to have to change the sound to something that doesn't startle the hell out of me every time.)

Also have an analogue modem on the phone line that lets me initiate calls from my command line by just typing something like, "call dad" and it looks up contact information in my centralised contacts list. It also cross-references incoming caller ID info with the contact list and displays caller info on my computer screen and the Kodi media player[6].

If I were to really get into more home automation in earnest, I think being able to control the curtains in the house would be ahead of controlling lights. Hate wandering around the house opening and closing them all.

Two things I dislike about current trends in home automation are:

1) The requirement for an active Internet connection for a lot of your stuff to work. I want it self contained to the house and not sending information out into the world.

2) The need to have your phone near to you to use half the stuff. E.g., with the lounge room light switch mentioned above I can turn the light on or off at the switch (as well as the remote). I don't have to go find my phone and swipe back and forth five times just to toggle it.

One concept I find very interesting from the late 90's was the adaptive house[7]. It would learn things like your hot water usage, preferred room temperature and ambient light levels and used neural network reinforcement learning to optimise. I wonder how far this could be taken now with advances in machine learning.

[1] https://www.michevan.id.au/posts/garage-door-sensor/

[2] https://www.itead.cc/sonoff-touch.html

[3] Aside: To my mind, in most cases it seems to make more sense to automate the switch, than automate the light bulb itself. Changing a light bulb doesn't need an electrician though, I guess.

[4] https://github.com/arendst/Tasmota

[5] https://www.michevan.id.au/posts/are-you-there/

[6] http://ncid.sourceforge.net/

[7] https://www.cs.colorado.edu/~mozer/index.php?dir=/Research/P...