I use a Apple Shortcuts / Apple Home as the main source of home automation for my house. In this post, I talk about some of the automations I have in place and am experimenting with!

Personal Automations

• When my wake-up alarm goes off, start playing music, and turn on smart lighting. I’m working on a daily summary action which reads my calendar and misc. things using the intercom on my Homepod.
• If I snooze my alarm, it slightly dims the lights.

Music Shortcuts

• I have also created some automations for playing music at various volume levels on my HomePod. I have it configured to play sleep, productivity, and hacking playlists I have set up, at the press of an icon on my Home Screen.

House Automations

• Under-cabinet lighting - this fades in during the morning. Apple automations don’t support any sort of fade in for lights, so this is separate controlled separately via Hue (even though they’re some Generic ZigBee lights).
• During the holidays, I use a myriad of smart outlets, controlled on a schedule for different lighting accents and decor. For outlets (the Hue ones are quite expensive), I use these TP link ones:
  • I’ve used these TP Link Outdoor Outlets
  • As well as these TP Link Indoor Outlets

Wish List for Apple Shortcuts / Home

Usually - this works well. Sometimes - it fails to find an accessory and that causes things to fail. I have had better luck by moving the bulk of morning actions into a dedicated shortcut, and Triggering that via the automation.

Here’s a couple things I wish were available in Shortcuts and Apple Home:

HomeKit Lighting - Fade In / Out

I wish that Apple Home had the ability to fade lights in or out (e.g. over a period of seconds or minutes). This would be great for more ambient lighting (e.g. fading in lights as you wake up). Hue has the ability to do this on its own (as well as more custom effects), but it would be nice to integrate.

Scripting Language

As a programmer - I wish there was a native scripting language for Apple Shortcuts. I’m currently trying out https://cherrilang.org/. This doesn’t seem to support any of the home actions I use, so it’s a non-starter. I’m trying out some longer “assistant” style automations I have been trying out that are way to complex to be only fully supported on iPhone, and with only drag & drop.

HomePod Intercom Volume

I’d like to be able to set this. In some contexts - the volume it uses is much too loud, especially when waking up in a quiet house, the intercom volume is quite loud.

Presence Awareness

“Am I home?” - is a question I ask within some of my shortcuts. I run a script in the morning to determine if I’m actually home before deciding to turn on my lights automatically. This would be a nice to have.

Right now, I need to pull the device location, compute the distance and use that, which isn’t awful - but it’d be much cleaner as an “Am I home?” action.

Additional Likes

I do like the fact that some more technical shortcuts, (e.g. SSH) are available, as this helpful in allowing me to run automations with custom things in them from my Raspberry Pi or Home Server. It is pretty nice to run a script over SSH using a button on my Home Screen.