Dealt with something similar with my rgb bulbs in my bedroom. Flashed ESPHome on the bulbs and since they were on light switches I set them to come on as a shortcut. Need the light on and don’t have your phone? Just flip the switch off then back on. Have a power flicker or an outage you get bright lights from 7 rgb bulbs set to full blast. Wake up to burn your retinas bright light at random times of the night.

I use the bulbs as a wakeup sequence that shows weather via color and temperature as well. Then some others light up in order 25% every couple minutes. Then turn off after a certain amount of time. If I sleep through it I’m generally sick or that tired and need the extra rest, I use my phone’s alarm function for the have to be up and moving fallback.

I want to say a version of this was posted yesterday as well.

Sorry. I’m just passing the information along. I would suggest contacting the Open Home Foundation. https://www.openhomefoundation.org/

For the money the Samsung A9+ is tough to beat IMHO.

11 inch touch screen in a slim package. Get a cheap jelly case run a couple screws into the wall, slip the tablet in place, route a charging cable.

No matter what you buy or build it will eventually be obsolete and need to be replaced. A decent tablet will last around 8 to 10 years as a wall mounted dashboard. The A9+ can be found for around 170 right now and the next prime sale will likely see it around 150. So that’s around 15 to 20 per year of use and all you need to do is either install the HomeAssistant app or setup Fully Kiosk.

One of my favorites is setup with a large (1242 LED’s) WLED strip on my front porch. I have a motion sensor that is setup to trigger a switch to a bright white when the strip is on or if we get home and the presence detection picks us up and sets the strip to stay that way for a certain amount of time. The strip has a few different random settings that it can use when turning on as well so one night it may be a rainbow and another night it may be a solid color that walk around the strip changing one LED at a time. Comes on automatically at sunset and turns off at 11pm but until 6 am the strip can still come on with motion or presence detection.

The other one controls my electric water heater. I have 3 temp sensors, one near the top heating element location, one near the bottom element heating location, and a third on the water output line. The original temp controllers are still in place and set the maximum temp so the tank can never go over acceptable levels even if the ESP8266 fails in an on mode. Then I let the temp ramp down at a certain time of the evening and ramp back up in the morning for use throughout the day. But lets say you come home late and need a shower, when the output temp goes over a certain point after the system has started to ramp down it will kick the heater back into it’s regular mode until the temp drops below a certain threshold. It also uses the HA app to track where we are located and I have two zones that keep the water heater going, those are home which just barely covers the property and near home which is within about 30 miles of home. Once everyone who is tracked goes outside of those zones the temp ramps back down to the overnight setting and ramps back up when we get into the near home zone.

I have a ton of other things I want to implement like lights that turn on red automatically after a certain time of day so you can walk around at night and not kill your night vision. Right now I am working on the house as the electrical, plumbing, and a ton of other stuff needed work. But when I am done my cheap old $18K house will be a fully integrated smart home.