I have really been wanting to get bed occupancy working with Home Assistant for a while.
I have some lights around the house that are triggered by motion detectors. Especially
for the one in the bedroom, I thought it would be nice if I could disable the
motion-activated light whenever someone is in bed.
To quote DigiBlur, "Get your shit out of the cloud!"
The Issues
Many Smart Home devices use "The Cloud" and a Smart App on your phone
to manage them. However, what happens when the cloud provider decides
to shut down their service, breaking all of your devices like
Lowes did with its Iris product
in 2019.
So, my Home Automation journey starts like may others: I bought one smart plug.
Some of the wiring decisions made while building my house make no sense. In
my family room, the light switch controlled an outlet in the very back of
the room. But that wasn't a good place for the lamp for the room. The lamp
needed to be way across the room where there is no switch-controlled-outlet.
I bought a Wemo Mini Smart Plug 3-pack. I removed the long-ass extension
cable I had running along the wall (and across a doorway) from the lamp to the
switched-outlet. Then we could turn on the lamp with, "Hey Google, turn on the
lamp." And it was glorious!