Home Assistant has a reputation for primarily blinking your lights and automating your blinds, but that’s not all it can do. While that’s certainly fun, its capabilities go far beyond smart home automation, despite the name. Thanks to all of the software you can link up to it, too, its power can also be utilized by students looking to improve their organization. You can centralize classes, deadlines, chores, travel time, laundry, and notifications in one place, entirely local and private. Start with a phone, a calendar feed, and a simple dashboard, and you’re already in a great place going into a new school year.
As for why you’d use Home Assistant for this, the answer is simple: it reduces your daily cognitive load. It pulls classes and deadlines from a calendar, shows you what’s happening now and next, reminds you to leave based on traffic and rain, and can even do things like send you a notification when your clothes wash finishes. It’s local-first, so there’s no trading privacy for convenience, and you can even add multiple users if you want to share it with friends, family, or even housemates.
A minimal setup is needed
Start with a dashboard and a basic reminder to leave
The beauty of this particular setup is that you don’t even need any crazy hardware to get it working. A Raspberry Pi, a spare mini PC, an old laptop, or a Docker container on a NAS all work, and you can install the Android or iOS companion app for presence, sensors, and push notifications. After that, simply import a Google Calendar or any iCal link from your school or LMS, or link your Google account to Home Assistant.
We’ll start with a simple dashboard that answers what’s likely to be the most important question of the day: What’s happening today? It’ll contain your calendar, your to-do list, and you can even automate the populating of your to-do list based on your calendar items for the day. Maybe a specific class requires you to bring in a specific book or tool, and your to-do list can automatically be populated based on what’s coming that day. For when it’s time to head to class, you can create an automation that pulls from your calendar and notifies your phone, looking something like this:
alias: "Class starts in 30"
mode: single
trigger:
- platform: calendar
entity_id: calendar.classes
event: start
offset: "-00:30:00"
action:
- service: notify.mobile_app_your_phone
data:
title: "Heads up: {{ trigger.calendar_event.summary }}"
message: "Starts in 30 min at {{ trigger.calendar_event.location | default('') }}."
If you take public transport, you can also link Home Assistant to many public transport providers. Here in Ireland, I can link it up to the train service, but there are integrations for practically every country that will allow you to add buses and trains to your Home Assistant. That way, you can even set up automations that will tell you when to leave.
Building a Pomodoro timer
Work in sprints
Next up, you can easily build a Pomodoro timer that will silence your phone for your specified length of time. Pomodoro timers are great for productivity, working on assignments, or studying, and you can do it through a Home Assistant automation, triggered by a specific event or even via a button. Create an input_boolean helper called “focus mode”, and a timer called “pomodoro”.
alias: "Focus mode: ON"
trigger:
- platform: state
entity_id: input_boolean.focus_mode
to: "on"
action:
- service: timer.start
target: { entity_id: timer.pomodoro }
- service: notify.mobile_app_your_phone
data:
title: "Focus started"
message: "25 minute work"
- service: notify.mobile_app_your_phone
data:
message: command_dnd
title: priority_only
This will then turn on focus mode, silence notifications from your phone, and last for 25 minutes. When the 25 minutes are over, you can trigger the next automation:
alias: "Focus mode: OFF"
trigger:
- platform: event
event_type: timer.finished
event_data:
entity_id: timer.pomodoro
action:
- service: input_boolean.turn_off
target: { entity_id: input_boolean.focus_mode }
- service: notify.mobile_app_your_phone
data:
message: command_dnd
title: off
- service: notify.mobile_app_your_phone
data:
title: "Pomodoro finished"
message: "Take a break!"
You can also pair this with a light if you want visual feedback that your Pomodoro timer has finished.
Linking to your email
More automations, or just collect information
Home Assistant has an IMAP integration so that you can trigger automations and events based on what you receive. You can trigger automations based on important emails, such as a change to a class start time, a cancellation, or anything that you’d like.
What this kind of automation looks like depends entirely on what you care about and what kind of emails you receive. You can use it to spot newsletters and promotional material or pair it with a local language model for parsing information to pull out only what you need. You could even set it up specifically to pull your assignment results when they’re released, and display them in Home Assistant.
All of this is a bit more advanced, but it gives you an idea of just how well Home Assistant can work with your email to extract useful information. The basic IMAP integration is easy, though, and you can simply dump everything into Home Assistant based on a sender if class alerts come from specified addresses.
Home Assistant can do so much more than just hardware
It’s perfect for software, too
The bottom line is that without any hardware, Home Assistant can link up to all kinds of services, and there are countless integrations out there specifically built for bringing together software under the one roof. It doesn’t have to just be smart home devices and hardware, and some of my most powerful integrations are basic ones that link to Google Calendar and the weather.
For organizational purposes, Home Assistant has been one of the best quality-of-life improvements I’ve made. It helps me keep track of my work, helps me debug and test my self-hosted services, and allows me to build and test my own devices, if that’s something you’re interested in.
Home Assistant is completely free and open source, so if you think it’s something that can help, it’s worth trying. It may not be perfect for what you need, but it might just get the job done.