It’s no secret that (to use one the infamous term) I’m double tapping lymphatic cancer these days. More details here, but what’s relevant for this blog is that high dose steroid treatment (which is a part of the chemo, and unfortunately didn’t make me look like The Rock) comes with funny side effects like insomnia, and in my case, a hyperactive, albeit rhapsodic, brain on the “good days”. So I dusted off a couple of old and neglected nerd side projects (like unclouding my RSS), and picked up some new ones, like this one, The Tinerebox.
The problem…
…is that our apartment is long. I’m not going to boast how big it is (and so is my apartment!), but while it’s not too wide, it’s like 10+ metres long, with the living room/kitchen on one end, and the rooms of our teenage (in Dutch: tiener, hence the naming) daughters on the other. (If my calculations are correct, it must be somewhere between 17 and 20 metres, but my calculations are probably not correct, because, you know, steroids, galaxy brain, etc. I’m quick. I’m not accurate.)
Anyhow, this (not the brain, the apartment size) causes a problem that I’m sure a lot of parents will relate to: whenever dinner’s ready, OR they forgot to do their chores, OR left their shit stuff around, they don’t hear us calling them, unless we resort to a form of parental kulning… or take a walk of shame there and risk being exposed to the sight of potential ungodly tienerroom mess. (Which I parentally accept by the way: I was like this too and look how well I turned out.)
The idea akshully…
…came from Jul during a dinner: we should have a “summon box” in the tienerrooms that lights up / blinks when it’s time to eat or come to the living room for another reason. And I, having engaged my ADHD brain in other useless home automation projects, have carelessly started thining about this and decided it’s an absolutely stupid and delightful nerd project to pursue.
My interpretation of the idea was something similar to those “On Air” boxes next to studio doors that light up when people are, you know, On Air. This could then be remotely controlled from the kitchen by the cunning use of a button.
Delightful!
Cue the montage music,
(Online, because you know, immunocompromised.)
We need:
- 2 × small wooden box (around 150×250×50 mm)
- 2 × 230V / E14 socket
- 2 × 230V switch
- some 230V wiring
- 2 × 230V Zigbee light bulb
- 2 × plexiglas cut to size
- Some tin foil (for a reflective background)
- Zigbee button
- Paper in the printer
- Open Sans Condensed ExtraBold font
- Reduced line and font spacing
- This text:
The whole setup cost somewhere around 30 EUR, and about 3 hours between 4AM and 7AM on one of the insomnia days.
Let’s get automatin’,
We (I) have an existing Home Assistant / Zigbee setup, so this part is just writing the very simple script and automate it to the button. I’m not going to embarrass myself exposing my .yaml, but what the script does is
- light up the box for 3 minutes
- after 3 minutes start blinking frantically (escalation mode!)
- then stop
The script actually also sends a notification (“🔥The beacons of Minas Tiener have been lit!🔥”, because, you know, nerd) to our family Nextcloud Talk channel, @mentioning the tieners, but they typically don’t check this when they are at home (which is fine, I hate phones). I used this great Nextcloud Talk Bot for this.
Goes a little something like this:
Like I said: absolutely stupid and delightful.
But surprisingly and way beyond my original expectations: it actually works! Our yelling through the apartment has decreased significantly, and family morale has increased by an extraordinary 137%!
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