When I couldn’t find anything that seemed to work for me I decided to go with a “hands-free” approach. My alarm will arm-home when everyone has been home for 15 minutes. It arms-away when everyone is gone. It disarms when someone gets home. If armed-home and an exterior door is opened with presence detected inside by that door it disarms. I haven’t had a mis-fire since I started it.

lol - that won’t work for me, I live in Texas and that means my light would always be deep, dark red. Cool concept though.

As I replied to another who suggested ESPHome - I don’t want a bunch boards and wires stuck everywhere and unless I am misunderstanding it I’ll need to get into 3d printing to make enclosures for stuff. I can see going there some day but no room for a makerspace in this house until the boy moves out.

You don’t need to unlock your phone to fire an event in HomeAssistant. My iPhone needs to be awake but will still scan and run shortcut while locked.

I don’t do NVR - my servers are all low power except my PleX and I have so much storage dedicated to that I just can’t see adding more. All cameras have SD storage and I have key events backing up to cloud.

Done all that except the Xmas stuff - my neighbor across the street puts up incredible holiday lighting all year long…literally tens of thousands of dollars worth of gear in play. I can’t afford to even make a showing next to that.

Yes, LEDs and water flow and voice control among other goodies.

I keep hearing ESPHome but it seems so bare metal - how do you make the little boards look like they belong? I really don’t want to have to start 3d printing stuff to make enclosures.

I do but Mrs has clearly stated that she dislikes light level automations - I have a couple FP2 presence sensors and I set up various zones so the light would follow you around and dim asa you left. I wigged her out.

Actually NFC tags were one of my first things back when I was using HomeKit. They are much better in HA because you can fire an event without any interaction with the device that scans it and that is pretty cool.

Thanks, I have a 10-pack of tags that I could deploy to do random stuff for my own enjoyment. I appreciate the reminder!

I couldn’t find one that made me happy and finally decided to forget physical arming and disarming - I use companion app location (home/away) and automations to arm and disarm. All exterior doors have presence sensors near them and when armed home if presence is detected near a door it can be opened and the alarm is disarmed. I haven’t had an accidental trigger so far.

I can’t help you with that but it brought to mind a funny story. I was at a customer’s house doing some work and she was on a conference call so unable to be attentive. Her robot vac started working the bedrooms and bathroom where her catbox was and that glorious kitty had kicked out a sizable nugget that the robot grabbed and smeared all the way down the carpeted hallway and back.

Unrelated to your concerns, I would suggest a screen or plumbing vent cap to keep rodents from dropping in through the vent. Most don’t realize that this is a thing that happens.

Loose-fill insulation is not great in vertical applications. If you can afford it get spray foam. Otherwise you’re probably best off with basic fiberglass batts.

The cheap-as-dirt meross does, it has an open/closed sensor.

Most openers have a dumb switch interface. A simple close-to-change circuit - I’ve never had one that wasn’t that way. If MyQ is so complicated (serial interface!?) then it needs to go anyway.

lol, just get a dumb opener and a shelly relay or use a meross unit. Super cheap and flawless local control that is cloud-connected if you want it.

I wrote it to automate my workflow - I’m in sales. I enter site details at the customer location and my app crunches the numbers to pre-fill all relevant documents (contract, financing, etc) in PDF form. I also use it as a presentation device to explain service and product details/specs using pictures, videos and PDF documents.

No more paper, no more fiddling around with calculator and rate-cards. I do a little data entry and basically my job is done.

Oops, I’m sorry - I should have mentioned that it’s not on the App Store. It is chock full of company proprietary documents, photos and sales formulae. I wrote it just for myself.

The one I wrote myself to automate tasks at work. It has saved me hundreds of hours of tedium and makes my job so much easier. It only cost me a few weeks of learning (I am not a developer, just a tinkerer) to get it done. It lives happily on my phone and iPad and I use it every day.

The HR department at your company is the company’s advocate they are not your advocate.