After we ran out of sparkling water twice in a row, I decided to do something against that. The plan is to receive a notification when there are only three bottles left:

#Ideas

I need a way to sense how many bottles are left. Here are some ideas I had:

• putting a light sensor under each bottle in the box
• put a scale under the crate
• use a camera and a neural network to do some object detection

I don't know enough about neural networks and object detection, but I think this would be rather complicated and overpowered for what I want to achieve. It may be really hard to distinguish full bottles of water from empty ones, even I lift them slightly to check if they are full or empty. It could work for colored beverages though.

Using light sensors for each bottle is still an idea I want to check out in the future, as this solves the weight problem I'll go into in the next section.

Having your windows connected to Home Assistant opens many possibilities. I've written down some ideas on what you could do with such information:

• 🚨 Create an alarm panel, so when a window is being opened while you are away, the siren rings and you get a text message
• 📱 Be notified which windows are still open before you leave
• 🌡️ Turn off the heater when someone opens a window
• ❄️ Ring a bell when the windows are open for too long
• ... and possibly much more

I don’t have a TV in my room, but I have a projector. Until now I used to watch movies on my wallpaper, but the wallpaper is textured so the image quality is bad. So I decided to buy a screen, motorized of course to integrate it into my smart home. I've chosen this one.

After installing the screen on the ceiling, I immediately tried it out. The first problem I had was the screen lowering itself too far (1:1 aspect ratio) but I wanted it to stop at an aspect ratio of 16:9. While some people claim there are potentiometers to tweak the endstops, I didn’t found them and as this can result in damaging the screen, I discarded this idea.