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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: October 29th, 2023

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  • 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.