Home Assistant saves my Daughter from Nightmares

When our daughter is (finally) asleep, we like to watch a few more series to wind down. Currently, we are into relatively violent stuff like The Boys.

My wife likes to tell the anecdote that she used to crawl out of bed as a child, then secretly sit on the stairs and listen to her parents or the television. Once, she even had nightmares because her parents were watching a horror movie and she couldn’t get the horrifying screams out of her head.

But back to the present:

I don’t want my child to see exploding heads or dismembered people, let alone dream about them.

Home Assistant to the rescue!

The first challenge was to figure out how to detect my daughter’s escape attempts in time. The solution is super simple:

I installed a cheap little door contact on the door to her nursery. “Install” is an exaggeration, these things are just stuck on.

I then integrated it into Home Assistant. When integrating new sensors, it’s best to remember to tidy up right away: give them a sensible name and disable any entities you don’t need.

Now I can notice my little runaway as soon as she opens the door!

The opening of the door is the trigger of my automation. When this trigger occurs, I pause the playback on my Fire TV Cube and let my speakers make a little warning announcement.

Of course, this only happens when the cinema is currently enabled and it’s our daughter’s sleeping time. Otherwise, we would hear the announcement all day long…

alias: Notify at Fire TV Cube when Lia opens her door
description: ""
trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id:
      - binary_sensor.liasroom_door
    from: "off"
    to: "on"
condition:
  - condition: state
    entity_id: binary_sensor.lia_sleeping
    state: "on"
action:
  - condition: state
    entity_id: input_boolean.livingroom_cinema_enabled
    state: "on"
  - target:
      entity_id: tts.home_assistant_cloud
    data:
      cache: true
      message: Lia ist wach!
      media_player_entity_id: media_player.wohnzimmer
    action: tts.speak
mode: single

An authentic evening on the couch

• My wife and I are watching a gore-slasher-nightmare-horror movie
• Our little escapee sneaks out of her bed and opens the door.
• The movie pauses immediately; there are no scary noises or destructive images.
• The announcement confirms that our daughter seems to be awake.
• One of us can quickly go upstairs and put our daughter back into bed before she even has a chance to look at the screen.

Conclusion:

That’s why I love Home Assistant! Such a little automation adds so much value. Sweet dreams!