How a QA Engineer Built 99 Home Automations Using Home Assistant

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A Lead QA Engineer living in Madrid began using Home Assistant after growing frustrated that his garage door required up to eight remote presses and his apartment alarm demanded a manual PIN every time he returned home. What started as a simple goal to mirror the garage door on his car screen expanded into 99 real-life automations covering gates, floor heating, appliances, and security. He fine-tuned multi-gate entry sequences by physically timing his own walking routes with a stopwatch, then built a settings page so timings could be adjusted without hardcoding values. His radiant floor heating setup alone required 14 automations to resolve conflicts between the physical thermostat and Home Assistant, including a monthly valve-exercise routine he would otherwise forget. The project reflects how software automation thinking, when applied to physical systems, can eliminate repetitive manual tasks that persist simply because no single platform previously connected them.

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