This is the first Home Assistant automation that got the thumbs-up from my family

Published Sep 7, 2026, 7:00 PM EDT Adam has a degree in Engineering and has a life-long interest in technology. He has been writing for over a decade for various print and online publications, with a focus on consumer tech. He joined How-To Geek in 2024 while working at Pocket-lint. As well as being a long-term fan of Apple products, he also has a strong interest in smart home tech, running a Home Assistant server at home to automate all his smart home devices. He believes that the ideal smart home should work with minimal interaction from the user, with automations running as if by magic rather than requiring you to push buttons on a control panel. You can find more of his work on Muck Rack. For many years, I built smart home automations that my family tolerated at best. It took a change of approach to finally create an automation that my family genuinely appreciated. That single automation ended up being a real turning point in how my family sees my smart home hobby. I've been messing with my smart home for a long time I was using a voice assistant before it was a thing Credit: Yuliasis/Shutterstock My first smart home device was a simple smart bulb that I bought in 2014. That single product sparked an obsession that hasn't left me ever since. Being able to control my light bulb from my phone was great, but it felt like my phone was just another light switch. I soon went down a deep rabbit hole and ended up setting up a voice assistant system using a PC and an Xbox Kinect sensor. The sensor's mics listened for smart home commands, and the software running on the PC would look for recognized phrases and then send the appropriate commands to my smart bulb. Before long, I was able to control my lights with my voice, turn on and control my TV with an IR blaster, and even open specific TV channels by saying the names of the channels. This was a few months before the first Amazon Echo launched in November 2014, which made the whole process far easier. My family has borne the brunt of my experiments Things can and do go wrong Credit: Tim Brookes / How-To Geek I've really enjoyed tinkering with my smart home over the past decade and more. Even when things didn't work as I hoped, trying to find and fix the problems was all part of the fun, for me, at least. The same wasn't the case for my family. It took maybe an hour after setting up my very first smart home device before my wife encountered her first problem. I'd turned the smart bulb off via my phone, but the light switch was still on. My wife wanted to turn on the light and used the light switch. Since the switch was already on, this turned the power to the light off, so instead of the light coming on, nothing happened at all. This is a common problem with smart bulbs, and it was only the first of a long line of issues that my family has had to deal with while I've tinkered with smart home stuff. For a long time, they weren't huge fans of my hobby. All that changed with one automation. I finally realized how to get them on board Building the automations they wanted was a game changer Before my son learned how to tell the time, he would often wake up ridiculously early, unsure of whether it was morning or not. He'd come into our bedroom, wake us both up, and ask us if it was time to get up. We'd glance at the clock, realize it was 3 AM, and take him back to bed before struggling to get back to sleep. I decided to set up a simple automation to solve the problem. I replaced his light bulb with a smart bulb and made an automation that turned the light blue at 7 AM. If he woke up early and the blue light wasn't on, then he knew it wasn't time to get up, but once the light turned blue, he could get up and come in to see us. It worked way better than I'd hoped. If he woke up a little before 7:00, he would sometimes get up and play in his room. Even if he turned his light on, it would still turn blue at 7 AM, at which point he knew he could come out of his room. My family now actively helps find problems They like helping to fix things that don't work Credit: Adam Davidson/How-To Geek My son loved the automation, and so did my wife, who could finally get some sleep. My daughter then wanted one of her own. She likes to read before sleep, so I put a smart button in her room that turns off her light and starts her sleep sounds playlist once she's ready to go to sleep. Once my family realized that smart home projects could work for them, they were totally on board. They finally started using the automations that I'd set up for us all to use that they'd mostly ignored before. Now they actively join in with trying to find and fix problems with automations. My obsession is no longer something I tinker with in a dark room, but something the whole family is actively engaged with. One automation was all it took. Sometimes the simplest automations are the best The automation I created for my son was incredibly simple, but it worked perfectly. You don't always need complex automations; sometimes a couple of lines are enough to make a big difference.