Technology

I use them to timeout lights all the time and schedule outdoor lights.

For me, one of my principles is that smart home stuff should work normally , with automation as a bonus. That means smart switches, not bulbs, and generally means no subscriptions or internet dependencies.

Some use cases for my smart switches are:

• automatic timers for multiple rooms to make the house appear lived in, or to match my schedule
• voice response, in case my hands are full r I don’t want to get up
• easier dimming - I can say “set dining room light 20%” faster than I can get up, walk over, and futz with the switch
• scenes, such as work mode, to set everything just the way I like it

For example, one of my automations is

• half an hour after sunset, turn on dining room light to 50%
• if weekday, set to 30% at 9pm, and turn on bedroom light
• if weekend, do it an hour later
• turn off dining room half an hour later
• turn off bedroom light half an hour later

If I’m home, this matches my schedule. If I’m not, maybe I look like I am. Maybe you think this looks needlessly complicated but it’s convenient and it’s not something you can do without smart devices

There's other use cases for that.

The immediate one, and applies to my own living room, is that there's one switch for the lights and it's in the far back corner by the front door, and like 15 feet and around behind the couch from where you'd enter the living room from the rest of the house.

The smart switch lets me turn the light on and off from the inside of the house without having to navigate the room and cats in the dark either via a voice command, mobile app, and ESP32 button.

Though, and this is the next use case, I really don't have to do any of those. The smart switch facilitates lots of fun things, and in this case that room has a mmWave occupancy detector that'll turn the light on and off based on the time of the day and if there's a human in the room or not. (mmWave stuff is super accurate compared to the older motion detection crap you'll find in use in that you don't have to actually be moving, because it's good enough to determine if a human is in the room motion or not.)

And, of course, since this is the living room and the TV is in there, it's also tied into the media playback status of the TV to dim the lights when you turn the TV on, turn them off when you start playing a movie, and then turn them back on dimly after you pause, and then slowly increase the brightness over the next 5 minutes if you don't resume playing the movie (unless everyone leaves the room, at which point it'll turn the TV and lights off based on the occupancy sensor.)

Also it's useful for setting a timer: the backyard and front porch lights go on at sunset and off at sunrise, and the controller is smart enough to grab when this is on the internet so it stays accurate and timely year-round.

So yeah, it's maybe not life-changing by itself, but it's seriously the backbone of a lot of automation I've got in place that simplifies having to even think about or do anything to adjust light levels based on where I am in the house and what I'm doing in the room.

Disclaimer: this was not trivial to setup, the components required to make it are not off-the-shelf and require electronics and soldering knowledge and you have to understand the ESP32 ecosystem and how to modify code and deploy them to do what you want. It also then requires you to configure all of this in HomeAssistant, and in my case, requires yet another piece of software (NodeRed) and a ton of webhooks to make everything cooperate and work. It's not trivial, it's not for everyone, and it's not a product most people could build on their own, so I don't entirely disagree that a switch by itself is life-changing, but if there was a proper ecosystem around them where you could do this shit I think more than a few people would hop in.