Taking a nosedive into the world of Home Assistant is truly liberating. Whether you want to bring all your smart devices under one roof or revive old ones, it can power smart automation in your home. Like many, even I am guilty of assuming that the Home Assistant's charm lies in how it deals with various IoT systems. While making different smart devices talk with Home Assistant, I dipped into its automation capabilities. And it was worth it. That's when I discovered a handful of Home Assistant automations that didn't need extra hardware to make my day easier.

5 Keeping a check on your internet connectivity

Know when it borks

Wouldn't you want to know when your Wi-Fi connection drops or if there's some crazy download happening? After installing Home Assistant on my Pi, the first automation I created for my ASUS RT-AX88U router was to monitor its uptime status. The automation alerts me whenever the internet connectivity drops from my router. So when the WAN status on the router changed, the Home Assistant popped a notification on my phone and made an entry about it in the logbook.

Based on frequent notifications, I poked the ISP to send a technician to solve the random disconnection issue. Home Assistant will mainly detect your router automatically and add its details. If it doesn't, you can check out the official integration for ASUS, TP-Link, Netgear, MikroTik, Ubiquiti, and Eero (via HACS) routers in Home Assistant.

4 Someone tries to sneak out your phone, tablet, or laptop

Catch them in action

Often, my nephew steps out "accidentally" with my iPhone or iPad while I am left rummaging through stuff, searching for it. You, too, can prevent people from pulling a fast one. A nifty automation can prompt you when someone attempts to sneak away with your phone or tablet. For that, I added a new zone called Room from Settings -> Areas Labels & Zones -> Zones, besides my default Home zone. Next, I selected the Zone Automation option, which pulled up a default Blueprint.

Next, add the Person (Home Assistant account), zone, and Device to notify the user whenever a device with the Home Assistant app leaves a zone. That's how you can create a smooth notification. It may seem redundant with the false positives if you step with either of the devices. But that's still better than being oblivious to your gadget's absence.

3 Fooling around with your Media Server or NAS

Protect your media library

To cut down my streaming spending, I self-host Jellyfin on my humble Pi-based NAS at home. However, my family kept messing up the media library, and files would often go missing. Instead of monitoring everyone personally, I only wanted to know when someone was using Jellyfin to access content. So you can automate the Home Assistant to send you push notifications whenever someone streams content using Jellyfin. Under the 'When' option in Automation, I selected Add Trigger -> Entity -> State, chose Jellyfin entity, and added '0' in From and '1' in To options.

For the duration, I decided on two seconds, but you can set a higher value. In the 'Then Do' option, I searched for Notifications and selected the option to receive them on my phone. Now, every time someone fires up Jellyfin when I am away, the Home Assistant notifies me with a custom message.

2 Setting medication reminders and keeping a log of them

Never miss a pill

Medication reminders are another crucial automation for yourself and your family. The best part is that the Home Assistant also maintains a log book of the choices - whether the pills were taken, delayed, or skipped entirely. I was lucky to stumble upon a community member's ready-made Blueprint for Android and iOS devices. The only options I had to set were the time of the reminder and the target device to which to send the notification. I've replicated the automation to set them for different hours of the day and can easily access the logbook to help me get on track and take my medications on time.

1 Trying to use digital remotes instead of physical ones

Spooking the family at times

I no longer argue with my family over remotes for Apple TV, Roku, or Fire TV Stick. Instead, I have recreated a digital version of the remotes with a dedicated dashboard in Home Assistant. On top of that, I found a handy automation system that turns the TV on and off (with Wake on LAN) during specific evening hours, mostly on weekends. At the same time, I tried to adjust the automation based on my location, which wrongly triggered it several times. So, I had to tweak around to test and set special conditions for the Home Assistant to check if I was at home and in the same area as the TV before switching it on.

Home Assistant can be fun even without IoT devices

Home Assistant is undoubtedly excellent smart home automation software for various IoT systems. Over time, I learned that automation can work even without smart devices. I intended to use Home Assistant's automation without third-party or internet-dependent services. And I barely scratched the surface. You leap further with automation to scrape RSS feeds or podcasts from the web and set up tracking notifications for your shipments. Besides, you can soup up cool things with a Home Assistant. That's why we call it a rabbit hole and truly mean it.