My laundry system publishes the state to mqtt and a python script reads that and sends us a notification over slack. That has been working for years.
I recently added the HA integration and I have it run a script I called, “house talk” and it flashes some general area lights and uses TTS on the chrome casts to tell us a message. That is working pretty well, as long as the chrome cast connects in time.
Ah nice. I use telegram for the notifications, and the dfplayer is my way of simulating tts without any cloud needs. Only thing my ha needs from outside is weather for the sprinklers. Would be nice to use tts for other things but I am waiting for local solutions to come up to par (like almond/ada).
We don’t have any apple products, so I like to play a game with my gullible children where we talk to ‘siri’ and we just type in stuff to say on the chromecast. Our siri is a bit weirder than the apple one 
.
But the dfplayer is a great solution too.
In my sprinklers, I use a weather service to get the amount of precipitation predicted today, and the last two days, along with the average temperature and then use some sort of fuzzy logic to determine how much water we need every three days. It works pretty well, but I live in the desert (Denver) so it almost never changes. 
. That was a fun project too.
That sounds like a fun project sorting the logic for sprinklers. TBH, I’m totally cheating and using a Rainmachine for my sprinklers. It uses weather from NWS and calculates transpiration rates etc. I have only had it for about 8months now, but so far I haven’t had to touch it except for the few weeks after my wife tossed seed on the lawn last October (then I manually watered 3/day to be sure the top layer stayed moist for the seeds). It’s been an eye opener really… I was using waaaay too much water during winter, and not enough during summer. In fact, since octoberish I think it has only watered a total of a few minutes altogether. Before I was watering about 2hr total every other day during winter. During summer I was doing about 3hrs every other day… but RM was putting down 2.5hrs every day during summer.
We don’t have water meters in my neighborhood yet, unlike the rest of the county. I think that has to do with the concentration of politicians and lawyers living in the area lol, but whenever they do put meters in I’ll be ready.
We live in a place with limited water, so I have always underwatered the lawn. I was hoping for a poor man’s trasnpiration equation, but I just decided to do X if it was 70 that day and 1.5x if it was 90 (or something like that, I can’t remember) and scale it in between. I also have hours of daylight (sunup to sundown) so I reduce it for that. Then I subtract the inches rained and I hve a rough estimate of the inches per minute in each zone.
I have no idea if that works better or not. The grass isn’t talking and it is the familiar green to brown color.
This is what the log (slack) looks like (but I can’t have them on in the winter, so I just unplug the relay board):
Sprinklers started.
We need 0.25 in water today.
Normally, it would be: 0.50 in.
We've adjusted for sunlight (-17.7%)
We've adjusted for heat (-29.3%)
Compiled from these weather records:
2021-01-23 0.03in 51.94F 0d ago
2021-01-22 0.00in 48.15F 1d ago
2021-01-21 0.01in 48.30F 2d ago
Received this message from hwio:
Program with 0.25 inches for a total cycle time: 42.41 minutes
We have 275 weather reports and 94 water reports in the history
I love the thread also. I designed and managed the development of the fastest microprocessors in the world in the early 2000s. After “retiring” I found a few years ago very good capability and a wifi radio in the 8266 and now the ESP32 chips. It was a fairly simple matter to add a DHT22 temp/humidity sensor to an 8266, connect up door switches from an alarm system and connect it through MQTT to NodeRed both running on a RPI. I’ve since added a bunch of lighting controls, heater controls, and have even built a reprogrammable (through wifi of course) music box for the dresser.
You might consider just adding the temp/humidity sensor to the ESP32 on the wall to manage the sample rate. Would seem to be much simpler than connecting temp through BT. Home Assistant has improved, but I’ve found it still too cumbersome in many cases.
I had a dht22 in the first two iterations and that was fine. But they both failed eventually. I am hoping the one wire sensor is more reliable.
Just to be clear, the communication from the bt sensors to the thermostat esp goes BT to another esp32, then over wifi to the mqtt server, then to the thermostat. If there hasn’t been a message recently, it will ignore the offset and just trust the value it has.
It is only a week old, but it seems to be working well.
