Things to monitor and control

People often ask for ideas of what to do next. I say if you can count your devices, you need more.

Some of the things I'm doing:

• Smart bulbs and light switches of course mostly controlled by motion and or contact switches
• Alarm system
• TV and other AV gear mainly via Harmony hubs
• Voice assistants
• 61 security cameras (at the moment and not including the Ring doorbell as it is cloud based) linked into HA motion sensors, alarm system and AV controls to mark video and send triggered cams to main stream video dependent alert and alarm levels.
• Indoor and component temperature monitoring, smart thermostat and window AC and fan controls.
• Weather monitoring
• Watering system
• Tons of monitoring, as that is the bit that people always seem to forget, Which tells me is something is offline or a battery is low or is signalling replacement as in the case of a UPS. This ranges to things like shows being short on a TiVo which would indicate the cable company knocked the tuner offline with an update again and over loaded CPUs on PC and updates need applied. I even wrote a program to make adding things to monitor easier.

Still on the to-do list:

• Find smart door locks that can tell me the doors lock status at a reasonable price. The weather is so variable here in central Texas, heat and humidity wise that exterior doors change shape enough that doors tend to need a push or a pull for the dead bolt to align so I've given up on actually being able to lock/unlock them. Wish now I'd wired the dead bolt holes with recessed switches.
• Open garage door on command though mainly for the "Goodbye" routine that puts the site into away mode only after checking the alarm is ready to arm. Seen too many glitches to feel good about it opening automatically on return.
• Smarter motion recognition. Ultimate goal is to be able to have it tell me what is sees moving and tell me where a pet was last seen. Would prefer a Blue Iris plugin or similar but might look at a separate system like YOLO I can send triggered images to.
• Want GPS tracking of pets when practical. Which seems soon.
• Of course wild critters are getting to be big deal here which accounts for many of the cameras. For example I recently added 4 just trying to find a snake that got in the shop. Lately feral hogs are the thing.
• Well and water softener monitor so know if the well has tripped, a filter has clogged or a pipe is leaking / burst.

Other stuff some have mentioned but not on my list:

• Smart or controllable blinds.