Yeah, I do something similar to Andrew; bought a few IKEA tradfri buttons and remotes, and set them up to toggle lights or media in various rooms.

Is there a reason you wouldn’t want to just get a zigbee/zwave/wifi smart outlet switch?

Cool, I’ve never used hall effect sensors but I’ll look into them too. Let us know how it works 😁

I’ve been thinking about this recently too!

I kind of have a very crude version of this, by simply mounting my garage door tilt sensor as high up on the door as I could. Since it would go horizontal along with the very first section of the door, it triggers as soon as the door is open about 1/5 of the way.

Response isn’t very fast, though, so if I wanted more precise control I was thinking about building 3 ESP distance/ultrasonic sensors mounted to the ceiling pointed downwards, one at the end of the track, one about 1/4 of the way from the end of the track, and one at the start (where the top of the door stops when it’s completely open).

So the sensors would detect in order of sensors triggered, “closed -> cracked -> slightly open/ing -> open”.

Tracking the previous state of the door in a variable would let me know the direction the door is moving as the sensors get triggered too.

I was going to suggest this too. A magnetic white board on a conspicuous wall in a common space. It’s what my wife and I use for her cottage food business. Whiteboard marker, post-its, or notes affixed by magnets.

Thank you for this post; there’s a lot of this that I didn’t know, and I’ve always had a vague anti-PETA sentiment without really knowing why.