SMART HOME BUTLER · LIVING ROOM
The five seconds in, and the five seconds out
The two moments in a day when you most need a hand both happen at the front door. Arms full, running late, pitch dark. Coming home has to be fast. Leaving has to be thorough.
The doorway is the busiest place in the house
When you walk in, your hands are usually full. Keys in one, groceries in the other, a bag on your shoulder. That is exactly when you have to reach for the row of switches on the wall, and get the order wrong. After dark it is worse, because the entry is the darkest stretch of floor you own.
Walking out is the mirror image. You are in a hurry and your head is already at work. Did the air conditioner go off? The lamps? The blinds? Those questions usually arrive in the lift, and nobody turns back for them. So everything stays on all day.
The two halves are not equally hard. A welcome has to be fast — the light has to be on within three seconds of the door opening, or it may as well not exist. A departure has to be thorough — thirty seconds late is fine, but nothing can be missed, and it must never fire while somebody is still home.
Which is why they listen to different things
The welcome listens at the door. A magnetic contact reports the moment the door swings, and that signal is close to instant, so the lamps can move straight away. The departure listens to your phone. Once the phone leaves the area around your home the system does not act immediately — it first confirms that nothing inside the house is moving, and only then starts switching things off, one at a time.
The welcome, second by second
Here is the left half of that drawing written out. Not one step in it needs a hand from you.
- 0s
Door opens, a little light appears
The magnetic contact reports the door swinging and the entry and living room lamps come straight up to 30%. Deliberately not full, because you might only be reaching in for something, and because you may have just walked out of bright daylight and your eyes need a beat.
- 3s
Someone really came in, so it brightens
The living room motion sensor confirms movement and the lamps rise to 60%, with the hallway following. If the door opened but nobody entered, the light fades back out after two minutes rather than burning all evening.
- 8s
If it is daytime, the blinds open halfway
The system checks the daylight first. In daylight it opens the blinds halfway, and once the room is bright enough the lamps can dim again. After dark it skips this entirely and the blinds stay shut.
- 15s
Cooling comes back from its away setting
While you were out the target temperature was nudged to something cheaper to hold. Now it returns to what you normally like. Nothing is restarted, only the target moves, so there is no sudden roar from the unit.
- 30s
It stops, and hands the room back
After thirty seconds the system stops acting on its own. Dim the lamps, close the blinds, kill the lights — it will not push back. This matters more than anything else on the list. An automation that keeps overruling you gets switched off within three days.
The shutdown, and why the order matters
Leaving takes twice as long as arriving because it has to make sure first. The sequence is not arbitrary either.
| Time | What it does | Why it sits here |
|---|---|---|
| 0s | Notes that your phone left the home area | Noted only, nothing has been switched off |
| 10s | Checks the indoor motion sensors for activity | Someone still home cancels everything, gladly |
| 25s | Living room, hallway and entry go dark in order | Inward out, so anyone left inside can still walk out |
| 45s | Cooling stops and the blinds come down | Lights first, so nobody is startled by sudden dark |
| 60s | The vacuum starts and a message reaches your phone | The noisiest thing goes last, once the place is empty |
Four things it quietly takes care of
Safety
Those first few steps inside are no longer dark. Arms full, a threshold underfoot, light already on — that is one fewer chance to trip.
Running cost
Cooling does not idle in an empty house all day, and lamps do not burn until evening. On a summer afternoon that is the most expensive stretch of the day.
Peace of mind
A message lands on your phone spelling out what was closed. No more reconstructing the checklist from memory in the lift.
Convenience
The vacuum waits until you are gone, so you come back to clean floors instead of a machine circling your feet.
It is the same living room either way. The difference is that you no longer hunt for a switch in the dark, and no longer replay the checklist on the way to work. Those two moments happen more than seven hundred times a year, and the attention they hand back is worth more than the seconds.
What you need in place
Home Assistant calls every device in the house an entity — the smallest thing the system can give an order to. The brand and model do not matter at all. What matters is which family it belongs to.
| Job | Family it belongs to | Essential? |
|---|---|---|
| Knowing the door opened | binary_sensor door contact | Yes |
| Knowing somebody is there | binary_sensor motion | Yes |
| Knowing you have gone | device_tracker phone location | Yes |
| Living room and hallway lamps | light lighting | Yes |
| Blinds or curtains | cover shading | Nice to have |
| Air conditioning | climate cooling | Nice to have |
| Robot vacuum | vacuum cleaning | Nice to have |
| The confirmation after you leave | notify phone app | Recommended |
How the whole thing is wired together
There are only three lines through it: one comes in at the door, one leaves with your phone, and one is reserved for you.
A blueprint is a fill-in-the-blanks form
The hub ships with a set of tested automation blueprints. Think of a blueprint as a form where the boxes are already drawn for you and all you do is fill them in. This setup uses three of them.
| The box | What goes in it | Suggested |
|---|---|---|
| What counts as the start | The front door contact opening | — |
| What else must be true | Living room motion within three seconds | Required |
| First action | Entry and living room lamps come up | 30% |
| Second action | Lamps rise further, blinds open in daylight | 60% |
| When to stop acting | After this long it stops leading | 30 sec |
| How long before leaving counts | Indoor stillness required before shutdown | 10 min |
Fill those in and both halves have an owner. You never have to work out what happens if somebody is still home, because that condition is already built into the blueprint.
Different homes, different numbers
Those are general-purpose values. If your place is unusual, shift them like this.
| Your situation | First-stage brightness | Leaving delay | Why shift it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Typical household of two or three | 30% | 10 min | General values, fine for most homes |
| Studio flat, living alone | 50% | 5 min | Small space, one stage is enough, nobody else to shut out |
| An older relative home in the day | 40% | 30 min | Wait longer, a nap leaves motion sensors quiet for ages |
| Someone often home very late | 20% | 10 min | A dimmer first stage at night will not wake anyone sleeping |
| Cats or dogs indoors | 30% | 20 min | Pets trip motion sensors, so a longer wait reads truer |
Four optional extras
The three core blueprints are genuinely enough. Everything below is a bonus — add whichever one you actually want.
| What you want | Blueprint | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| A warmer-looking welcome | adascene_single | Treats the whole room as one scene, so the ceiling light, floor lamp and cabinet strip land in proportion instead of popping on one by one |
| A warning about open windows | entity_state_trigger_notify | If a door or window is still open at shutdown it messages you first, and closes everything else as planned |
| To say it out loud on the way out | voice_trigger_things | Tell the system you are heading out and the shutdown runs immediately, without waiting on location. Useful when you are in a rush |
| Lamps and blinds working together | light_sync_cover_and_fan | When daylight comes in through opening blinds the lamps dim to match, so room brightness stays level instead of doubling up |
You do not have to set this up yourself
The WOOWTECH smart hub ships with HA-MCP installed, which lets an AI connect straight into your system and do the work: find the devices, build the rules, tune the numbers, then go back and check whether any of it actually runs. All you do is say what you want.
Prompts you can copy straight out
Every block below can be copied whole, and the button on the right does it for you. Pick the one closest to what you want. You do not need all five.
Set up a welcome for my living room. When the front door opens, turn on the entry and living room lights, brighter after dark, and skip it entirely if there is already plenty of daylight. Leave everything else for now, I will ask later.
Set up both the arriving-home welcome and the leaving-home shutdown for my living room. Arriving: when the front door opens, bring the entry and living room lamps to 30%, and once motion confirms someone walked in, raise them to 60% and turn on the hallway. In daylight open the blinds halfway, after dark leave them shut. Bring the air conditioner back from its away temperature to my usual one. After thirty seconds, stop acting. Leaving: only start once my phone has left the home area and the indoor motion sensors have been quiet for ten straight minutes. Then switch off the living room, hallway and entry lights in that order, stop the air conditioner, lower the blinds, start the robot vacuum, and send me one message listing what was turned off. When it is done, test it yourself, confirm it really runs, and then tell me which devices you used.
An older relative is home during the day, and while he naps the motion sensors can stay quiet the whole time. So keep the shutdown conservative: after my phone leaves the home area, wait for thirty straight minutes of stillness indoors before closing anything, leave the air conditioner alone, and only switch off the living room and hallway lights. Raise the first welcome stage to 40% as well, he needs more light than I do.
The first stage of the living room welcome is too dim. Make it 50%, and raise it to 80% once someone walks in. Also change the leaving delay from ten minutes to twenty, because half the time I am only taking the rubbish downstairs. Just tell me when it is changed, no need to rebuild anything.
I got home last night and the lights did not come on the way they usually do, but I am not sure which setup to blame, because the leaving-home one may still have been running. Sort one thing out for me first. How many separate setups are currently in charge of the hall and living room lamps, can they fight each other, and which one wins. Once that is clear, ask me for whatever details you need. I still remember last night.
Common questions
The lights went out while I was still home
The door opened but no light came on
Two of us live here and it shuts down when one leaves
The cat keeps tripping the motion sensor
The welcome light is harsh, it comes up too fast
Phone location drains my battery, is there another way
What you get back is not really time
The welcome might save you two seconds. The shutdown saves you a trip back upstairs, at most.
But once those five seconds at the door stop asking for your attention, coming home is just coming home, and leaving is just leaving.