I’ve built up a bit of a reputation for automations in Obsidian. (In fact, it’s one of the reasons I started this blog, so that I’d have a place to start sharing workflows and examples for the community to use.)

So, when someone jokingly tagged me on the Obsidian community Discord asking if you could brew a cup of coffee with Obsidian, it got me thinking. While I use Obsidian as a way to both design and inventory the built environment, and use NFC tags to interact with Obsidian, could Obsidian be used to interact with the physical world?

Spoiler alert: yes. You can create an Obsidian smart home.

I put together a proof-of-concept video showing how you can use the Obsidian Shortcut Launcher plugin (Obsidian link) to control smart lights in your home. If you had a simple coffee maker with a manual on/off switch, you could conceivably turn it on in Obsidian using Shortcuts and a smart switch.

While on the surface this seems like a frivolous experiment (…which, okay… it totally is), this could actually be quite a handy feature. As I mentioned earlier, I use Obsidian to keep a home inventory, but it could also be used to keep a log of what smart home devices and Shortcuts are active in which room, and launched from the room note.

You could also use it to manage the lighting or music during an in-person D&D session, like a DIY Elgato Stream Deck. Switch to your note and statblock for the BBEG showdown, and you can dim the lights and change the music.

Basically, your only limit here is your imagination. It still completely tickles me that you can use Obsidian to control your smart home.