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Home Assistant waters my plants

https://finnian.io/blog/home-assistant-waters-my-plants/
46•finniananderson•4d ago

Comments

PetitPrince•1h ago
> I think I need more Zigbee repeaters to get a reliable mesh network, but to date I haven’t found any consumer-grade devices certified for use in NZ.

Since many devices are also Zigbee router (it's a mesh network after all), maybe some additional lightbulb for exterior would suffice ?

theshrike79•1h ago
Pretty much all mains powered Zigbee devices also act as routers in the mesh.
calgoo•1h ago
Exactly! I prefer the small power plugs that lets me control fans and other power systems as relays. Family has a habit if switching of light bulbs using light switches and i have not gotten the change approval to disable the physical switches in the house :)
yoavm•56m ago
For me the best solution was to use smart switches (mainly dimmers) and dumb lightbulbs. People can use the switches like any other if they want, but I can still have my automations and remote control.
navigate8310•32m ago
I wouldn't recommend anyone to yank out physical controls for accessibility purposes.
squigz•25m ago
It seems like quite the hassle to have to pull out one's phone every time one enters or leaves a room just to turn on lights?

Let's hope you don't have to get to the bathroom quickly late at night...

ga_to•15m ago
Disabling the physical light switch should usually only come after setting up a different way of controlling the light by hand, without a phone.

Most likely there is some sort of motion or presence sensor that turns on the lights which then turn themselves off after some time or no more presence is detected. There are also small wireless switches that could be used in place of the actual wall switch.

I have done so in my apartment for example. Since the bedroom light switch is for some reason outside of the room I taped it down and put a wireless switch in a more reasonable spot. Another example is the hallway light, which only turns on by motion sensing when the sun is starting to go down.

liam_krewer•22m ago
I can recommend Shelly for light switches over smart bulbs. It's a relay that fits inside the wall switch with zigbee to sit between the light and the switch.
zerof1l•29m ago
I wanted home assistant compatible plant watering solution that works on a solar panel and does not require being connected to the water line and is Zigbee compatible. Unfortunately, I could not find any. So I did a DIY solution: a big barrel which I manually fill with water, a 12V pump (usually sold for camper vans), some rechargeable batteries, 10W solar panel, a solar charging controller, and Tuya ZG-2002-RF switch.
atoav•21m ago
An art student of mine once needed a way to electrically control precise small amounts of water. We solved that using:

  1. Water tank and gravity  
  
  2. Medical IV flow regulator¹  
  
  3. Servo hooked up to that IV flow regulator via a 3D-printed part  
  
It worked very well. In medical applications off must be really off, so it was also quite safe in that regard as well. Her 3D-printed part had a little bit too much flex in it, but in principle this works quite well. If it is really, really safety critical I would still recommend a mechanical fallback that protects in case of power loss or when the servo fails open (e.g. bending the hose with the force of a spring if electricity is gone).

¹: see https://www.gvs.com/en/catalog/iv-flow-regulators

denkmoon•19m ago
Cron waters my plants :)

Canada's bill C-22 mandates mass metadata surveillance

https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2026/03/a-tale-of-two-bills-lawful-access-returns-with-changes-to-war...
748•opengrass•13h ago•219 comments

Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?

43•tathagatadg•52m ago•11 comments

How I write software with LLMs

https://www.stavros.io/posts/how-i-write-software-with-llms/
240•indigodaddy•9h ago•182 comments

The 49MB web page

https://thatshubham.com/blog/news-audit
595•kermatt•15h ago•268 comments

Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/chrome-devtools-mcp-debug-your-browser-session
490•xnx•16h ago•201 comments

Home Assistant waters my plants

https://finnian.io/blog/home-assistant-waters-my-plants/
46•finniananderson•4d ago•11 comments

Kona EV Hacking

http://techno-fandom.org/~hobbit/cars/ev/
50•AnnikaL•4d ago•15 comments

Electric motor scaling laws and inertia in robot actuators

https://robot-daycare.com/posts/actuation_series_1/
92•o4c•3d ago•19 comments

What every computer scientist should know about floating-point arithmetic (1991) [pdf]

https://www.itu.dk/~sestoft/bachelor/IEEE754_article.pdf
75•jbarrow•4d ago•12 comments

Stop Sloppypasta

https://stopsloppypasta.ai/
377•namnnumbr•17h ago•160 comments

LLM Architecture Gallery

https://sebastianraschka.com/llm-architecture-gallery/
421•tzury•19h ago•32 comments

LLMs can be exhausting

https://tomjohnell.com/llms-can-be-absolutely-exhausting/
234•tjohnell•14h ago•159 comments

Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

https://isaacfreund.com/blog/river-window-management/
306•dpassens•20h ago•159 comments

The Linux Programming Interface as a university course text

https://man7.org/tlpi/academic/index.html
107•teleforce•11h ago•14 comments

How far can you go with IX Route Servers only?

https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/how-far-can-you-get-with-ix-route-servers
41•ingve•3d ago•3 comments

Linux 7.1 to Retire UDP-Lite – Allows for Better Performance with Cleansed Code

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Retiring-UDP-Lite
10•doener•35m ago•4 comments

Glassworm is back: A new wave of invisible Unicode attacks hits repositories

https://www.aikido.dev/blog/glassworm-returns-unicode-attack-github-npm-vscode
268•robinhouston•22h ago•165 comments

Six ingenious ways how Canon DSLRs used to illuminate their autofocus points

https://exclusivearchitecture.com/03-technical-articles-CSDS-00-table-of-contents.html
41•ExAr•1d ago•5 comments

//go:fix inline and the source-level inliner

https://go.dev/blog/inliner
162•commotionfever•4d ago•68 comments

Lies I was told about collaborative editing, Part 2: Why we don't use Yjs

https://www.moment.dev/blog/lies-i-was-told-pt-2
93•antics•3d ago•49 comments

The emergence of print-on-demand Amazon paperback books

https://www.alexerhardt.com/en/enshittification-amazon-paperback-books/
170•aerhardt•1d ago•129 comments

Reviewing Large Changes with Jujutsu

https://ben.gesoff.uk/posts/reviewing-large-changes-with-jj/
16•bengesoff•3d ago•0 comments

What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

https://blog.zuthof.nl/2023/06/02/what-makes-intel-optane-stand-out/
210•walterbell•20h ago•148 comments

Bus travel from Lima to Rio de Janeiro

https://kenschutte.com/lima-to-rio-by-bus/
185•ks2048•4d ago•71 comments

SpiceCrypt: A Python library for decrypting LTspice encrypted model files

https://github.com/jtsylve/spice-crypt
44•luu•1d ago•7 comments

A Visual Introduction to Machine Learning (2015)

https://r2d3.us/visual-intro-to-machine-learning-part-1/
364•vismit2000•1d ago•31 comments

A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-new-bigfoot-documentary-helps-explain-our-conspiracy-minded-e...
67•zdw•13h ago•68 comments

ASCII and Unicode quotation marks (2007)

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html
23•exvi•7h ago•14 comments

Learning athletic humanoid tennis skills from imperfect human motion data

https://zzk273.github.io/LATENT/
159•danielmorozoff•19h ago•33 comments

Cannabinoids remove plaque-forming Alzheimer's proteins from brain cells (2016)

https://www.salk.edu/news-release/cannabinoids-remove-plaque-forming-alzheimers-proteins-from-bra...
138•anjel•10h ago•84 comments