Hii all. I hoped someone could help with a noob with the following requirements. I am a CPAP user with sleep apnea. Because I’m exhausted in the evening, I sometimes pass out before remembering to put on my CPAP, which just makes things worse the next day. I was hoping to design a system that would alert me by a certain time, for example 11pm, if I don’t have the machine on. I could then wake up and put it on and go to sleep again.
The machine itself doesn’t seem to expose any hooks that would allow this to happen. However, if I could monitor the current from some kind of smart plug and then add some simple logic (if current to CPAP plug = 0 and time = 11pm), then I could create an alarm in my phone to get me up.
I’m tech savvy and can do programming, but I don’t have much experience with home automation systems. Can anyone suggest a path forward?
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You basically just created your automation. Now, all you need is home assistant, an energy monitoring plug, and your smart speaker (Alexa, Google,or both) and put your requirements into an automation. I’m willing to help you build this automation if you get stuck.
How about an alarm on your phone you just dismiss.
Do you have a home automation ecosystem picked out yet? Ie habitat, home assistant, etc? That will be where the logic of your automation lives. Seems like most tech savvy folks choose home assistant, but that will involve setting up a server on your home network, figuring out whether you want to use zigbee or zwave or something else. Is this the only automation you want to do or are you wanting to be able to grow into automating other stuff?
No, I don’t have a any kind of system yet. I’m looking for something that’s easy to get up and running, but that could still grow as, like most nerds, I’m sure I’ll find lots of additional uses for it. Setting up a server seems rather heavyweight for my current needs, but might be worth it down the road.
So if the only thing you’re looking to do is this one thing, you can definitely get just a smart plug and use any number of little things to automate a routine for it.
That said, if you’re a nerd and you like the idea of automations like this, you probably won’t stop at just one or two and you might as well do what I just did last week and start with the “gold standard” which is Home Assistant.
It’s self hosted, free, has tons of documentation and info online, lots of people who wanna help, and works with a whole lot of stuff to keep you from being locked into an ecosystem.
That said, if you happen to be an Apple user they also have a very solid setup that’s more straightforward with their HomeKit.
Home Assistant can run as it’s own OS on something like a Raspberry Pi, or if you have a spare PC you can toss Linux on there and run it from a Docker container in about five minutes.
At that point you would just need to find a wi-fi plug or grab a zigbee controller to plug into that PC and one of those plugs and automation to do what you want would take about five minutes.
Just getting started in all this stuff myself so I’m not an expert and others here will know a lot more specifics, but that said I’m loving Home Assistant so far and it’s cost nothing but time at this point to get some cool automations going.