Panq

You’re right in that it’s a useful tool for various kinds of abuse, but so is almost every useful home automation/home security sensor.

The most obvious/useful use cases I can see are:

• turn on bedroom lights when the last person gets out of the bed
• turn off whole house lights when the last person gets into bed.

Both should be easy with load cells under the bed legs but rather difficult otherwise.

(Useful assuming a household of two adults in one bed that is).

Is dumb doorbell + separate CCTV camera a valid alternative? Even my fairly basic Reolink camera has a much better image quality than any doorbell camera I’ve seen, and HA can pull an image from it and push it to my phone in only a few tenths of a second whenever someone pushes the doorbell.

You’re right in that running HA just for a WoL timer would be silly, but (presumably) it’s already running for other, less silly purposes.

I’d say the main benefit is when the machine requires regular (as in daily) reboots, or if it’s something you don’t trust is fully private and want to be powered off outside work hours. Not useful for me, but I can see why it would be handy.

I remember seeing someone combine the two and had Home Assistant pull the photograph from USPS and attaches it to the notification when the mailbox sensor is triggered.

I’m mildly surprised OP’s laptop keeps the bluetooth radio powered up while asleep, but I would be a lot more surprised to find one that doesn’t work with USB HID.

Node Red by far gave me the best automation for numerous lights. X minutes after sunrise, it iterates every light that is on and calls turn off with a fairly long (2 min?) transition time, so the lights all gradually fade off.

It’s been running for years without me needing to touch anything, it doesn’t care if you replace/rename any lights, and the slow fade when it’s still getting brighter outside makes the change invisible.

I’ll bet you could do the same thing without Node Red, but nowhere near as easily.

Having some word or phrase marking the end of a request makes the voice recognition a little more reliable. It doesn’t have to be polite, but being polite when it’s totally unnecessary is a good habit to build.

“Do X please” makes it unambiguously clear (to a machine) where the end of the request is, whereas “Please do X” is mostly pointless.

It’s even sillier than that - 5x as much is 400% more. 399x as much is 39800% more.