Using HA to improve sleep hygiene.

[ornate harness]

I have horrible sleep hygiene. I usually go to bed between 10pm (on a really good night) and 1-3pm (on a bad night…. I often fall asleep on the couch).

I also have a bit of trouble waking up. In the morning, but specifically I tend to doom scroll in the mornings too much.

How can I use home assistant to improve my sleep habits? What sorts of things have you done? Bed sensors, presence sensors, LED strips / WLED, etc.

(Please let me know if o need to clarify my post!)

[river coral]

My TV turns off automatically at 11pm
If you have a smart watch which can detect sleep, you could use that to wake yourself on the couch
I have Ikea blinds in the bedroom, them opening serves as my alarm

[dapper cobalt]

You could use the Adaptive Lighting integration to adjust light temperature if your lights support that: https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting

You could also set up a schedule on your calendar for when you want to go to sleep and wake up. Like have a reminder that it's almost bedtime so you know when to start getting ready then have things turn off at your bedtime. Likewise have an alarm in the morning go off based on your calendar event

[uncut cave]

You can use a mm wave presence sensor or pressure sensor to tell you to go to bed, then get progressively more demanding (adjust lights, shut off TV/internet).

[ornate harness]

That’s an idea!

What kind of pressure sensor can I use? I looked online for a bed sensor but all I found were bed alarms for the elderly.

[dapper cobalt]

There's an esphome one that's really nice that someone from the community made. Let me find a link

https://www.elevatedsensors.com/store/p/bed-presence-for-esphome

Works amazing

[ornate harness]

So I think if I get one of these, and then plug my echo show in downstairs, I should be able to set up an automation, something like

"If 11:30pm
and
Robert Phone Home
and
Robert bed empty,

play ding on echo show"

then create more irritating alerts from there?

I could set up an 8 minute snooze that turns off the alert when I get in bed.

OH... WAIT.

I have two dogs that like to sleep on my side of the bed when I'm not there. I come up and have to drag them off the bed. so it's gonna detect my bed as occupied.. right?

[dapper cobalt]

You can adjust the threshold in which it determines you're in the bed.

It comes with a sensor that shows the force level 1-100 and a calibrate button all in HA

[dapper cobalt]

Oh and they have a discord for any other questions you might have: https://discord.gg/E7mmj5Gw

[ornate harness]

oh ok. So since the sensor is only in one area, it's unlikely that two dogs will be enough to weigh it down. nice!

[ornate harness]

I think it'd be cheaper to just get an ESP32 board and a couple of ribbon pressure sensors, don't ya think?

[dapper cobalt]

I think there's a bit of extra magic that they have done to get things working smoothly

Here are the origins: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/fsr-the-best-bed-occupancy-sensor/365795

[hexed timber]

That's what I used but connected to esphome, works great

Also its not ha related but if you doom scroll, put your phone on a charger in a different room.

[naive vine]

I use 3 alarms that need different levels of mental acuity to disarm

1. my phone 2. an alarm on an old Android phone that also doubles as my IR blaster I need to get up to disarm 3. an automation that spams the "off" signal to my heat pump which turns it off and makes annoying beeps

a more popular alarm hack is to make an alarm where you have to get up to fiddle with an NFC thing next to the coffee machine to disarm it

[ornate harness]

Now that’s an idea for getting up!

[ornate harness]

Thinking about this, I’d need two esp32s if I were DIYing this… one for the bed sensor and one for the LEDs (that is, getting some LEDs to respond when I get out of bed).

Is that correct?

[ebon yacht]

i imagine an esp32 will have enough pins to do both

i have a bed sensor esp32 setup which has 4 FSR's and a temp sensor. i do plan to add leds to it at some point but i havent gotten too it yet. but theres more than enough pins to do it

[ornate harness]

Ahhh ok. I’m used to using wled… if I used that I’d have to flash the board with WLED, which would mean I couldn’t use espHome on the board…

What will the setup look like once you add LEDs?

[ebon yacht]

`ah okay if you want to use seperate firmwarre then yes you could need two. if you look at setting up led control through esphome then i imagine you can expose them to HA fairly easily. but it will depend on your exact setup

[hexed timber]

i'd just buy two, they are still cheap ish

[severe garden]

I wrote a blog post about a bed sensor on GitHub. You might want to have a look at it: https://github.com/felixschndr/bedsensor-for-home-assistant-with-esphome

However in my experience it is quite a hassle to set up and sometimes a bit unreliable. I suggest using a mmwave Sensor with zone detection

[ebon yacht]

I did something similar HERE i found that mmwave occasionally had some false negatives in the night so went the FSR direction

[hexed timber]

I just did the smart home guy route, elder pressure pad alarm connected to esp32

[ornate harness]

I’ll definitely look at this. I gave up on trying to make my own led installation. As this is really just a nightlight type installation, I don’t need a bunch of fancy bells and whistles.

But I do have a force sensor and a spare esp board. Thanks for the link!

[ornate harness]

Ive seen other people use four sensors. Why is that? (Or rather two per side)

[hexed timber]

better chance of catching you if you move around at night and better measurement of two people

[ebon yacht]

the 2 main pressure points of a laying human shoulders/bum for both sides of the bed.

[plush brook]

I created a bed sensor a few months ago using 2 of this pressure pad: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079Y7NQ9F?ref_=ppx_hzsearch_conn_dt_b_fed_asin_title_8. They're both hooked up to a single ESP-WROOM-32. We have them positioned diagonally on either side. With them in that configuration our setup has been rock solid with zero false positives or negatives. Now there's no pressure adjustability, it's just a binary sensor configured for each mat, so I couldn't tell you how that would work with your dogs.