17 ms·

Circadian lighting with Home Assistant: Like f.lux, but for your house

534 points by modinfo 4y ago

thegagne 4y ago
On this topic, I need to replace the 2x4 flush fluorescents (ballasts are bad) in my basement. Any suggestions? Also looking for basic motion sensor to turn them off when nobody is down there.
- hedora 4y ago
  Bypass the ballasts (trivial if you are comfortable with AC wiring) and buy a no-ballast led tube. The company I purchased mine from went out of business. Make sure the CRI is above 90, assuming you care.
themaninthedark 4y ago
This looks amazing! I have been following home automation with a bit of skepticism, after all any fool can muck things up but to truly muck it up you require a computer and I dislike the traditional offerings due to privacy reasons. But this is something along the lines of what I would hope home assistance would do as well as being all self-hosted!
bippingchip 4y ago
While I haven’t gotten my lights set up like this, I do use home assistant, just like the author and it is simply amazing. For things like this, the setup can get quite complex, but the main benefit is that it provides a unified interface to any connected device in your home. My main use case is energy tracking: it does a marvelous job collecting and graphing data across a bunch of different sources: from the solar panels from one vendor, the semi proprietary smart meter protocol my electricity company has, weather data etc. Having all that data together in 1 place is an invaluable tool to make any investment decisions on energy improvements to our house.
- runjake 4y ago
  How/what are you using to monitor your smart meter?
  - makr17 4y ago
    Not OP, but in my jurisdiction the smart power meters broadcast consumption as SCM at 900MHz. rtlamr https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr does a good job of receiving and decoding those broadcasts using a cheap SDR. My local water utility also broadcasts consumption as SCM+, also 900MHz. I'm able to grab both with the single SDR.
    - runjake 4y ago
      Thanks for this. I have a bunch of SDR dongles. I am going to mess with it when I get home.
  - bippingchip 4y ago
    It’s always meter specific, I use the plugin and dongle as described here: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/dsmr/ https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/dsmr/ this works with a bunch but by far not all of the meter types in EU.
- pimeys 4y ago
  Add Node-Red to that and building automations is a breeze. And with a stick such as Conbee 2 you can control all the lights and non-light ZigBee products directly from Home Assistant. And you do not have to firewall the bridge from calling home once a minute.
mxstbr 4y ago
This reminded me of the video by DIY Perks building an "artificial sunlight" for their office: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw The amount of effort is unbelievable, but I'd love to have something like this at home. I can only imagine the impact on my productivity during winter evenings…
- bsimpson 4y ago
  I was at a party this weekend at a co-op where many of the rooms had no windows. I'm sure something like that would be well-appreciated. A few years back there was a philanthropist who wanted to donate housing to a university, but one of his stipulations was that everyone got their own room, and that the rooms that didn't get natural light would be outfitted with an artificial window like this.
bryanmgreen 4y ago
Excellent. I wish that Hue and LIFX would also make a physical adjustment switch/knob for color temperature.
- wdewind 4y ago
  I wished this too, and got close enough by buying the Hue remote switches: https://www.philips-hue.com/en-us/p/hue-dimmer-switch--latest-model-/046677562779 https://www.philips-hue.com/en-us/p/hue-dimmer-switch--lates... It turns out there are really only 3-4 different temperatures I use normally, and this allows you to switch between them. I also use the Hue timers so I frankly don't need to use this that often, but it's nice to be able to switch between both scenes and brightness levels without pulling out my phone (edit: and more importantly so people who aren't me can control the lights if they need). It's not a perfect solution: there are still some annoyances with people forgetting to leave the main switch on and only use the mounted remote, but overall I am very happy with this system.
  - r2_pilot 4y ago
    >It's not a perfect solution: there are still some annoyances with people forgetting to leave the main switch on I use light switch covers. They just screw on over the switch, and have one side open so you can manually manipulate it if you want, but it prevents accidental state changes.
mgraczyk 4y ago
In San Francisco you can spot some of these at night. Look at the tall buildings, some of the windows are illuminated with a deep red.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  Who needs to turn the lights on to go to the bathroom in a city? My bathroom don't have shades on the windows and I get enough light from the moon reflection and the street lights to do all I need to do in a bathroom in the middle of the night. It is not like I will put on contact lenses or look for a specific skincare product in the middle of the night. I can understand night being dark when you live in the middle of nowhere. In the city not so much.
  - m4jor 4y ago
    I mean if your bathroom windows were on the other side of the house or had no street lights shining into them, you wouldn't be able to see...
    - prmoustache 4y ago
      I've never seen any room with window in a city where it was completely dark during the night unless the window was closed with shutters and curtains. Even during new moon with a cloudy sky there is usually so much light pollution that it is never completely dark.
  - mgraczyk 4y ago
    Not sure where you got bathroom from. The people I know who have this generally do their entire apartment. Also it gets dark here at like 5:30
    - prmoustache 4y ago
      Who would put deep red lights at 5:30? Now I am even more confused.
jupp0r 4y ago
The problem with solutions like this is that color rendering index of RGB LEDs is abysmal to the point that I can't really stand it. I ended up just using 2300K high CRI bulbs throughout.
- ars 4y ago
  I'm thinking of using regular bulbs with smart switches, and dim them, and then add a bit of red light from a color-led strip. I think that would have the same effect, without needing those specialized bulbs.
- dotancohen 4y ago
  Bulb suggestions welcome!
  - jupp0r 4y ago
    https://store.waveformlighting.com/products/lux24-circadian-led-bulb-2400k-95-cri-e26-a19-led-filament-bulb https://store.waveformlighting.com/products/lux24-circadian-...
    - dotancohen 4y ago
      Thank you! They don't seem to have E27 bulbs, but I've actually come across their blog before looking for information.
AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
I've been doing this for years with Lifx bulbs: https://github.com/adamjacobmuller/lifx/ https://github.com/adamjacobmuller/lifx/ Works really well. Lifx bulbs have excellent CRI (proper color temperature adjustments, not just fumbling with RGB) the only downside being they are not cheap. Worth it IMO though.
- citruscomputing 4y ago
  I'm seeing 80 CRI on their website, which isn't great.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  Apple's supported this for a while via HomeKit Adaptive Lighting as well. It's great that it's becoming more ubiquitous!
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    Yeah, that was released with iOS 14 in September 2020. There's very little official information or documentation I can find on it, but it's mentioned here: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/control-accessories-iph0a717a8fd/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/control-accessories-i...
  - fotta 4y ago
    I wish I could adjust the curve though. It's still too white in the evenings for me.
    - AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
      This is part of why I wrote my own software to do this. Lifx kinda had the feature implemented (I do no like how theirs works) but also the curve was not great. Too dim in daytime, too bright at 2am.
jefftk 4y ago
> In the evenings, after the sun sets, the lights dim, and it gets harder to read and work on projects—that’s a feature. It’s a signal that it’s time for bed. Here in Boston the sun will set at 4:30 today, but that's way too early to be starting to send my body "time to go to bed" signals.
- hypfer 4y ago
  Yep. Same. I got so angry reading that utterly dumb quoted statement that I finally found the motivation to sit down and write a PR to fix that issue. Starting with adaptive_lighting 1.2.0, it is possible to specify a max_sunrise_time and/or min_sunset_time that ensures that the virtual sun always rises at at most a specific time and sets at at least another specific time. Basically, you can pin your virtual day to have at least e.g. 12 hours of daylight with optionally even more based on the real sun.
jonah 4y ago
Did you know that the actual, original, F.lux works with Philips Hue! https://justgetflux.com/lighting/ https://justgetflux.com/lighting/
- philihp 4y ago
  This should have always been a feature of the Hue bulbs. Might have been able to justify the cost, but now they're just 4x the cost of competitors that don't need a hub.
  - hermanb 4y ago
    It is a feature of the Hue bulbs being worked upon, see: https://hueblog.com/2022/07/16/natural-light-new-function-now-available-in-the-hue-app/ https://hueblog.com/2022/07/16/natural-light-new-function-no...
  - carlmr 4y ago
    Which ones that don't need a hub can you recommend? I'd like to have a sunrise simulation in my bedroom, so I only need one lamp like this, and the Hue system seems to complicated for that use case. Ideally it should be a strong lamp. Like a 100W equivalent LED bulb.
- Semaphor 4y ago
  Kinda. I never managed to get it to work. I then tried it with home assistant a few years ago, until I finally stopped using both f.lux and leaving my lights on yellow anyway ;)
_yb2s 4y ago
I don't really see an advantage to this over just installing fixed warm color temperature lights in the house. Depends on the building I suppose, but a well designed house should have enough natural light to only use the lights at the time when you would want 'warm.' If you live in at high latitude and need a 'SAD' light for morning and daytime use, that will always be a different light fixture and system, and therefore doesn't require this type of setup either. Ultimately, regular indoor lights just aren't bright enough to engage the biological response of daylight, regardless of color temperature.
- AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
  From lookin on amazon, SAD lights seem to be ~10k lux. I have 8*Lifx BR-30 at 1100 Lux each in my kitchen/living room. Seems pretty close.
  - ianburrell 4y ago
    SAD lights are used at distance of 1-2 ft to get that brightness. Your bulbs are probably 1100 lumen. Lumen and lux are different. Specifying lux requires specifying the distance or area. 8800 lumen on ceiling would be more like 800 lux at normal distance. Which is a bright room but not sunlight bright which is needed for SAD.
- fy20 4y ago
  Maybe in California you don't need this, but in the northern half of Europe (i.e. Germany and above) the weather this time of year is pretty abysmal. My office has floor to ceiling glass on three sides, but today at 2pm we had to turn on the lights because it was so cloudy and dark. The 10kWp of solar on my roof produced 2kWh today. I agree that most indoor lights are not bright enough, but that's mainly because there hasn't been an easy way to regulate them. There's no reason why you can't light your living space to 500 or more lux (most living rooms are barely 150 lux) at 6500k and regulate it down at night, and something like this makes it easy to do.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
matai_kolila 4y ago
F.lux has always bothered me, because despite their very large volume of supporting papers[0], what I've never seen is a consistent link between the "blue light" from those many studies directly back to my real computer/tablet/phone screen. I wish there were more studies done with computer monitors, rather than light boxes directly. [0] https://justgetflux.com/research.html https://justgetflux.com/research.html
- Loocid 4y ago
  I haven't looked at their list of papers but if they have evidence that blue light affects sleep, why would reducing the blue light coming off your phone/monitor NOT affect sleep? I don't really see why the source of the light would be important to the results.
  - goodbecause1 4y ago
    There is conclusive evidence that blue light does not affect sleep in any way as large as people expect. We're talking about 1 minute on average change in sleep duration. Here is a simple search on real trials: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?term=blue+light+sleep&Search=Apply&recrs=e&age_v=&gndr=&type=&rslt= https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?term=blue+light+sleep... In my opinion: The f.lux guy is intellectually dishonest. He's been at it long enough. He's got a lot of axes to grind. I don't see any trials in https://justgetflux.com/research.html https://justgetflux.com/research.html. f.lux use by normal people and other similar stuff is a good canary for how sophisticated a person is. Many, many adults suffer from going to bed too early, not too late, especially older adults, a huge number, millions. People have been trying blue light as an intervention for them, and it doesn't work.
    - Loocid 4y ago
      >f.lux use by normal people and other similar stuff is a good canary for how sophisticated a person is. What do you mean by this? Personally I find warmer colours easier on the eyes, especially in dark rooms. Nothing to do with sleep.
    - 4y ago
noobface 4y ago
Done this for the past 6 years running a combo of cheap zwave color temp adjusting lights, smart things, and a smart things app automation called circadian daylight. Guide/Forum: https://community.smartthings.com/t/circadian-daylight-smartthings-smart-bulbs/13623?page=11 https://community.smartthings.com/t/circadian-daylight-smart... Makes the evenings more laid back and I'm able to sleep a bit easier. Well worth the effort to get it setup.
- AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
  What kind of bulbs are you using? Most of the z-wave ones I found do not have great CRI and the cheap ones generally don't support white color temperature at all (falling back on some RGB).
  - mozman 4y ago
    I have recessed lighting in my home with non-serviceable LEDs. I would love to find a replacement that supports multiple color temperatures. Suggestions solicited!
    - Marsymars 4y ago
      My house has recessed LEDs throughout with hardware switches to control the colour temperature between five options. My approach has been to set colour temperature based on room (warmer in living rooms, basement, cooler in kitchen, etc.). I then use separate lamps or light fixtures to fill in where I want different colour temperatures. (Bedrooms and offices have ceiling fans with warm lights as well as some hue lights with colour temp that changes based on time, kitchen and dining room have warmer pendant lights / chandelier, etc.) Some manufacturers make dumb bulbs that dim-to-warm, which are very nice for some applications. (Dim-to-warm recessed LEDs exist, but they weren’t optimal for my application.)
    - AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
      I just replaced everything with high-hats. The decision was made easier when the living room ceiling collapsed on me.
xoa 4y ago
Lighting was the first and still most meaningful smarthome thing I've done, though I did it much more manually. Hue bulbs don't require any sort of WAN link, the hub(s) will work fine purely via LAN (though without firmware updates sadly without opening a hole), and of course one can then remote in with a VPN (via a bounce/mesh if you don't have a fixed IP) like anything else LAN-based. And 3rd party apps can seamlessly deal with multiple hubs. This is a fun read because I've been considering moving to Home Assistant, primarily because I'm worried about what happens when the hubs inevitably fail. 10+ years after its launch Philips has still never bothered to implement and backup/restore functionality(!!!), so that's a real driver. But in terms of pure functionality it's worked very well to code up a bunch of manual timers and time-of-day-based options on switches. And in terms of QoL impact it's been a pretty big deal for us. For context I live near the Canadian border, so not Alaska-level in terms of differences in night/day over the course of a year but far enough north that it does vary quite a lot. Being able to have a whole "sunrise" scene for the house, to have "daylight" with varying use of color and brightness (I've added 2 or 3 way bulb systems to a bunch of lamps to deal with Hue color bulbs not having as much brightness range as would be ideal), and warmth at night has made it so much easier to maintain proper sleep cycles. Rather then an audible alarm, I have a 15-minute animation of "sunrise" I put together that gently wakes me up and by the time it's getting to the whiter/bluer portion I'm set, I head down without any grogginess even when it's still black out. This all works for motion sensors too, and I've been able to massively cut down blue light emission and emission period of outdoor light at night without compromising safety and that I think is quite important for wildlife. There has been research on rampant blue light (and artificial light in general) affecting insect populations, which are under pressure anyway. I think Smart Home kit is powerful and can be (and certainly has been) misused. I will not touch anything with any sort of internet requirement, I segment things onto their own VLANs, and I'd be more cautious about it for things without the same visible indicators or with more potential side effects. But it has a real place too, and lighting is a perfect use case. I hope efforts like Matter pan out, the real issue is how vertically tied a lot of stacks are.
chem83 4y ago
While I'm a die-hard LED bulb consumer for its obvious longevity and efficiency advantages, I always wonder whether their seemingly invisible flickering messes up more with my well-being than the lack of light temperature and light brightness controls would. Would be nice to see some research on this.
- outworlder 4y ago
  Since when LED bulbs flicker?
  - function_seven 4y ago
    A lot of cheaper ones do half-wave rectification on the mains voltage, so they flicker at 60hz (or 50hz). Slightly "better" ones will do full-wave rectification but no smoothing, so they flicker at 120hz (or 100hz). A crap ton of decorative "Edison-style" bulbs have this cheap or non-existant circuitry in them. Buying from Amazon is a huge gamble. I have slow-mo video of disappointing lights. The quality bulbs will power the LEDs from a smooth DC voltage and not flicker.
    - saiya-jin 4y ago
      Exactly this - in age of most decent phones having no issue recording 1000fps videos, just record one with your lights. Heck even 240fps is enough. Suddenly those nice lights may not seem so nice anymore. I wouldn't be surprised if this has some quiet smallish long term negative effect on our brains and eyes. In same vein as 24fps-is-enough-for-everybody was a lie
- dbttdft 4y ago
  Wave a knife around in your kitchen with flickering lights. You'll see that the effect is not invisible, but an edge case. Just like with flickering LEDs on vehicles, you can't tell right away exactly where the vehicle is. Just having a flickering light on the edge of your peripheral gives you the same alert feeling when an object is moving fast near you, such as a fly. Also, flickering room light probably interferes with rendering of moving objects on a computer / TV screen (though the effect would be subtle and the bugs in the computer would drown them out).
Duhck 4y ago
I started a company to pursue circadian lighting (called Twist) and sadly pivoted away from it as a core value proposition because of weak reception from the market. I feel we were 20 years too early (we shut down about 5 years ago). Our tech enabled smart circadian lighting (we called it adaptive lighting) without configuration, an app, or wifi. The lightbulbs worked without any smart gadgetry necessary. Every time the switch turned on the light made a 20 ms computation based on the time it stored (via a low power clock and a super cap) and turned to the right brightness and color temperature automatically. This was protected by a patent but also could not find a buyer for the tech despite how differentiated it was Now I have an entire home with hue downlights + bulbs that does circadian lighting (with HASS as well) and while its not nearly as elegant of a solution as Twist (aforementioned startup), it is pretty great and a huge life changer to me and my fiancè. Edit: for context we use Philips Hue downlight retrofits + bulbs in other fixtures, all white ambiance, and Lutron Aurora dimmers, connected to HASS on a RBPI, running adaptive lighting from HACS
- Duhck 4y ago
  Adding our failed Series A pitch deck because I think its interesting for this crowd: https://docsend.com/view/bm5za5w https://docsend.com/view/bm5za5w
  - maximilianroos 4y ago
    Impressive deck! Why didn't the raise succeed?
  - dmix 4y ago
    That sounds amazing (insert Fry throwing money meme). It's too bad it didn't work out. I wonder if there's been any success stories where an idea failed but then later the founder tried again? I'm guessing usually the first experience burns them out they probably dont bother again.
  - pedalpete 4y ago
    That's a seriously great deck. Did you do a public post-mortem of why you think you were unable to raise?
jamesdwilson 4y ago
Is there any evidence F.lux and similar actually do anything other than make pretty lights? I mean, that's fine enough if that's what you want but I often hear health or sleep claims made. Are those substantiated in any way?
- JStanton617 4y ago
  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352721821000607?dgcid=coauthor https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23527... tl;dr - for the core phone/laptop F.lux use case, no, it isn't substantiated
  - dbttdft 4y ago
    What do you mean? That article says the claim is false. LCD monitors emit blue light whether you want it or not anyway. Merely setting something in the OS to change the color temperature does not eliminate blue light and I don't think it even necessary changes the color temperature.
- naasking 4y ago
  Yes, blue light exposure worsens sleep quality: https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-has-a-dark-side https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-ha... We kind of even know why, because of blue light receptors in our eyes linked to hormones released in the morning to increase alertness. This is linked to the light spectrum seen at sunrise.
AceJohnny2 4y ago
FWIW, Apple HomeKit + Hue has supported this for a few years (fall 2020?), they call it Adaptive Lighting, and for me this has been a killer app. It's kind of a bummer that Hue doesn't support it natively, but since I was already in the Homekit ecosystem, it was fine for me. I've paired this with powerful Sowilo [1] light strips, which have excellent warm/daylight white range and brightness, and it's kept S.A.D. in relative check. [1] https://sowilodesign.com https://sowilodesign.com I'm sure some people can come up with a cheaper solution via AliExpress than Sowilo's, but having a turnkey solution that integrated with Hue was essential for me.
- odysseus 4y ago
  Adaptive Lighting also works with the cheaper Philips Wiz bulbs, provided you use HomeBridge. ( I'm using this plugin for Wiz support: https://github.com/kpsuperplane/homebridge-wiz-lan#readme https://github.com/kpsuperplane/homebridge-wiz-lan#readme ) There's probably a Home Assistant plugin too ... Wiz bulbs will also be getting Matter support within the next year, so we'll be able to add them to HomeKit "natively".
  - yurishimo 4y ago
    I haven't found anything to suggest that Philips owns or operates the Wiz brand? Where did you find that information? More for my own curiosity than anything.
    - tonygrue 4y ago
      https://www.wizconnected.com/en-us/about-wiz https://www.wizconnected.com/en-us/about-wiz and https://www.signify.com/en-us https://www.signify.com/en-us Wiz joined Signify in 2019. Signify is the new name for Philips Lighting (post spin out from Philips).
- drewbitt 4y ago
  HomeKit adaptive lighting requires an always-at-home iPad or Apple TV to set it up. Until I have those I find manually setting a large amount of Hue schedules at various times to be OK.
proee 4y ago
How about a pair of goggles with a filter that can dynamically adjust the amount and color of light that gets through to your eyes. So, no matter what the environment you're in, your eye always get the right light at the right time?
diimdeep 4y ago
I am testing atm theory that cycling environment color temperature from cold to warm and back to cold in 90 seconds boost your performance in monotonic work by at least 15%. There is some old publication somewhere accoring to my sources, but I could not find it.
Scene_Cast2 4y ago
I'm currently looking to retrofit my place with variable color temperature lights. In industry parlance, it's is called "Tunable White". On one hand, non-hobbyist industry has a ton of great hardware options. High CRI, high R9, guaranteed lack of white point drift, 0.1%-100% dimming (although 85 CRI and 10-100% is most of what you'd typically find at Home Depot), etc. My issue is that there are several competing control standards (with 0-10V being the more common but primitive one for America), and plenty of them (like PoE Ethernet lighting - super cool IMHO) are very much commercial-only. And stuff like Lutron's RadioRA is quite proprietary, with not much interoperability. On the other hand, going with Phillips Hue or similar will lock me into that ecosystem - which also dictates which lights and switches I could use.
- function_seven 4y ago
  > On the other hand, going with Phillips Hue or similar will lock me into that ecosystem - which also dictates which lights and switches I could use. Good news, there's no lock in with Hue. I have about 20 of those bulbs around my house and they all work great with the generic Zigbee coordinator attached to my Home Assistant box. I don't use the Hue Hub, nor do I use the app. Alongside those bulbs I have another 15-ish Sengled bulbs that also speak Zigbee. They're cheaper and similar in quality, but the color temps don't get as low as Hue. (2700K vs. 2200K on the Hue) Only caveat with the Hue bulbs is that if you need to reset them for any reason, you'll need either a Hue Hub or one of their dimmers to do that. So I guess there's a little lock-in on that front, but it's not an ecosystem thing where you're stuck.
- atrainedmonkey 4y ago
  To avoid vendor lockin you can run an install of Home Assistant with a Deconz zigbee USB dongle, which can then act as a hub for a massive range of zigbee devices. including Phillips hue, but I use Ikea’s Tradfri bulbs at a third of the price.
- the_pwner224 4y ago
  Philips Hue operates over Zigbee so there isn't vendor lock in. Like you, I've also had exposure to the high end industrial LED emitters, but using those at home is hard. I ended up going with Ikea TRADFRI bulbs, they are much cheaper than Hue (USD 9-13 each) and don't seem to be any worse than the Hue bulbs. Ikea also sells Tradfri buttons (switches to control the bulbs) and motion sensors. And not relevant for this, but also Tradfri controllable power outlets. I'm using a Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 dongle (available on ebay for $20, uses a TI Zigbee chip) plugged into a small single board computer server. Zigbee2MQTT is FOSS software which interfaces with the Zigbee dongle and manages the Zigbee network. You can pair devices to the network with with its web GUI. Zigbee2MQTT allows you to control the devices over MQTT, a lightweight messaging protocol. I wrote a Python script for this. It connects to MQTT and listens for messages from the buttons (on, off, brightness up/down, CCT up/down). When it gets a message from a button or motion sensor, the script sends a MQTT command to the relevant bulb / group of bulbs. My setup is all Ikea Tradfri, but I could very easily add in Hue bulbs or other Zigbee devices such as ones from Aqara or Sonoff. I just purchased a Zigbee thermostat but haven't gotten around to setting it up yet. The whole thing works without internet access. Though you could expose the MQTT server to the internet and set up a method to control your devices when away from home. The main risk is that the industry moves past Zigbee. It's already moving to Thread & Matter, but I've only done a bit of research into that. I think Zigbee will be supported and products will continue to be available for a while. Or a self-hosted Thread software might also end up existing. The tradfri bulbs don't dim to 0.1% but they get pretty dim. And your control software could do things like selectively turn off certain bulbs in a room as you command it to lower brightnesses. The CCT range is good enough for me. The Tradfri bulbs are specified as >90 CRI. They don't flicker.
dayyan 4y ago
2700K 90+ CRI bulbs + Dimmer
- kefabean 4y ago
  some hi-CRI bulbs even lower the colour temperature to mimic incandescents when dimmed.
- cycrutchfield 4y ago
  Dimmer + Philips Warm Glow 2200K-2700K bulb
evanlivingston 4y ago
I use incandescent and halogen everywhere and don't have a problem with color temperature. Also, the CRI of my bulbs is incredible. My house has maybe 20 light bulbs in it, most of them under 75 watts, except for a couple of strategic halogen fixtures. Sometimes I think about getting LED smart lighting, but then I think about how many iterations of setups I would have to go through it get everything dialed in, all the e-waste I would be contributing to, all the plastic, all the security vulnerabilities, all the software updates, all the glitches, all the flicker from cheap PWD circuitry and I decide to stick with simple glass and red hot metal.
- Marsymars 4y ago
  > I use incandescent and halogen everywhere and don't have a problem with color temperature. Well, you might not have a problem, but some people like colour temperatures >3000K. > Sometimes I think about getting LED smart lighting, but then I think about how many iterations of setups I would have to go through it get everything dialed in, all the e-waste I would be contributing to, all the plastic, all the security vulnerabilities, all the software updates, all the glitches, all the flicker from cheap PWD circuitry and I decide to stick with simple glass and red hot metal. I’ve found a lot of that hassle is mitigated by getting high-end dumb LED bulbs, paired with reliable smart switches (only where specifically required for automation purposes) from a traditional lighting manufacturer with long support periods. (Lutron.)
- Syonyk 4y ago
  On top of that, even the "warm" color temperature LEDs put out a pretty good spike of blue light. I'm working on some analysis of this, and even the "warm glow" sort... yeah, there's a ton of blue. Right in the realm of spectrum that convinces our body it's day. So I'm not sure that the whole color shifting makes a big difference if you don't get rid of the blue as well. White LEDs are generally blue LEDs with phosphor coatings, but they still leak the blue. It's quite annoying. I've been going back to incandescents and they're properly nice in the evenings.
  - dbttdft 4y ago
    > On top of that, even the "warm" color temperature LEDs put out a pretty good spike of blue light. That's what I figured. LCD monitors are all painful for me to look at as well.
teslabox 4y ago
In the beginning of Electric Light, all bulbs were 2500K (incandescent). Mercury Vapor lights started getting used outdoors, but eventually the lighting industry figured out High Pressure Sodium (blue-free), and Low Pressure Sodium (pure orange) for outdoor lighting. Halogens can be tuned, I think... Some Halogens are 3000K. Automotive halogens are much more orange/yellow than the halogens I have in my ceiling fan. The two essential tools for creating a tolerable light in our modern world are dimmer switches and the using safe color temperatures for LED light sources. > The most significant benefit I’ve noticed is that I can get back to sleep after getting up in the middle of the night—now that I’m no longer blinded by harsh overhead light in the bathroom. My bathroom has too much light most of the time. If I was "working on my makeup" the amount of light would be just right, but that's not me. I bought my first dimmer switch at Habitat for Humanity. It was the kind that has a little lever next to the on/off switch - basically you decide on the amount of light, then it's pre-set to that amount. The Habitat dimmer switch was okay, but I'd still walk into the bathroom from a black hallway and blind myself, as I never checked the light level before hitting the switch. On surveying the dimmers at Home Depot, I settled on the kind that starts "off", and gradually increases the light level. My other dimmer switches are the classic round-dimmer option, and one that has a button and a big 'how much light do you want' .... "slide": https://www.homedepot.com/b/Electrical-Wiring-Devices-Light-Controls-Dimmers/Slide/N-5yc1vZc34iZ1z17l41 https://www.homedepot.com/b/Electrical-Wiring-Devices-Light-... I have three bedroom light switches. Ceiling fan light has halogen bulbs with a slide dimmer. Outlet switch has a deep red LED bulb in a table lamp. There was a 5000K fluorescent above the closet that I replaced with a fixture from the thrift store, that has a mix of orange and red bulbs. The kitchen has horrible hanging lights over the stove. Someone installed 3000K LED bulbs. I replaced these with incandescents and halogens, and installed a dimmer, but they were all terrible. Eventually I found some 2000K "Amber" Philips LED bulbs. These work with my LED dimmer, and are tolerable. With the Amber bulbs at least you're not staring into an artificial sun. If it was up to me, I'd get rid of the hanging lights and go back to the 90's light canisters in the ceiling. tl/dr: Good lighting is invisible. Bad lighting forces people to stare into artificial suns. "5000K" light sources are for plants, NOT people. To protect eyes, slide dimmers that always start with the minimum amount of light are the greatest.
- bravoetch 4y ago
jedberg 4y ago
Ha, I've been doing this manually for years. I found smart lights that could get as low as 1850k and then put them in key areas in the house. After the kids go to bed, I try to limit all lighting to 1850K (as well as using that color temp on all screens that I use at night). Of course I'm just one person so it's all anecdotal, but it definitely has helped my sleep in a noticeable way since I did it.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Cutting total light down a lot helps, too. The 60-75 watt (incandescent or equivalent) standard for lights—often with several such bulbs active per room, even—is way brighter than needed. Dropping room light to only enough to navigate the room safely, and using slightly-brighter (but still nowhere near 60 watt) lamps, either hand-portable or in particular locations, makes a huge difference, and you can still do almost anything in that kind of lighting. Once you get used to much lower lighting at night, ordinary whole-room lighting seems insane. Why try to make it as bright as day at night? You can read, play board and card games, play music, even draw or something like that, with a small faction as much light as the typical house puts out when you flip the light switch in a room. And it has big effects on sleepiness (if you don't ruin it by staring at a hyper-stimulating glowing rectangle—color temp may help a little, but Internet-connected screens are sleep poison)
Terretta 4y ago
For curious buyers, this is already more or less built in: - Philips Hue + Hue Hub : the default Hue app can do this, leveraging Hue Labs "Feel better with light" that runs from the hub so you don't need a laptop or other device after the formula is installed. - Apple HomeKit Adaptive Lighting + Hue or Eve -- I'm a big fan of Eve light strips. See more accessories here: https://www.imore.com/best-accessories-with-homekit-adaptive-lighting https://www.imore.com/best-accessories-with-homekit-adaptive... Beyond those, there are other options w/o getting too tricky: - Hue + Hue Automations + LivingScenes (or similar) + shift at sundown/sunrise - Hue Labs (various other options) - Third party apps like HueDynamics, and f.lux itself - IFTTT: https://ifttt.com/connect/weather/hue https://ifttt.com/connect/weather/hue For what it's worth, the Philips Hue white bulbs that vary the white temperature are great, with a better fuller white than the full color bulbs.
rednerrus 4y ago
Am I overthinking this or can I just use the Lifx bulbs an the sunset lights routine in the Alexa app?
MattDemers 4y ago
If you're interested in HomeAssistant to solve this problem, I wrote a simpler implementation, [1] of using the sunrise/sun position sensor to change scenes for a room's lights. This didn't involve having a Zigbee hub like this post suggests, mostly because all my lights were Hue, or Zigbee-compatible (IKEA-branded Tradfri lights) that were already on my Hue bridge. I found this worked for me, since I only needed to create four automations: - What happens if the lights are turned on after/before sunset (2) - What happens if if the lights are already on after/before sunset when it changes (2) This implementation seems more around more fine adjustments to brightness/colour/colour temp, but mine's more geared towards "Is the sun down? Change the scene." [1] https://mattdemers.com/sun-specific-light-automations-with-homeassistant/ https://mattdemers.com/sun-specific-light-automations-with-h...
- Sander_Marechal 4y ago
  I have an even simpler setup. I have Hue lights and Ikea on/off smart toggle switches. The simple 1/0 ones, not the large 5-button ones. I created a simple setup where tapping the top "on" part will toggle between "bright" and "off", and tapping the bottom "off" part will toggle between "low red light" and "off". I use it in all my bedrooms, the living room, bathroom and toilets. At the end of the evening I just switch to red light and wind down for bed. At night I use the red light everywhere. I have a newborn and it's fantastic to be able to change him or take him downstairs for a bottle without bright light waking him too much.
joch 4y ago
I would like to recommend Adaptive Lighting in favor of Circadian Lighting. It has the added benefit of being able to detect if someone manually adjusts the brightness or color, and then stops the automatic adjustment for that light. https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting
binarysolo 4y ago
Doesn't Hue do this already with a more elegant solution? I have a Hue setup at home and I do something like this, but hackier through an iPhone app I set up 4-5 years ago (it hasn't broken yet and I haven't touched it); I believe there are more elegant software solutions these days.
rsoto 4y ago
I wish something like this existed for TVs. Since I got my eyesight procedure 10+ years ago, I soon noticed I was quite sensitive to lights that didn't affect me at all (maybe my vision was too bad to even notice, don't know). That extreme sensitivity faded off in the first six months, but I still get annoyed by some lights and the first thing I do with a new PC/Phone is setting up Redshift[1] or Twilight[2], and although I'm not a big TV consumer, the times I do watch it, I wonder if there's a market for this kind of features. 1: https://github.com/jonls/redshift https://github.com/jonls/redshift 2: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid.lux&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid...
- hackerlight 4y ago
  There are apps on Android TVs (as well as Android phones) that are available on Google Play Store that do this.
sublinear 4y ago
Am I the only person deeply annoyed by this trend? Indoor lights are dim enough to begin with!
clashmoore 4y ago
I use Home Depot's Wiz lightbulbs for this around my home. $10 a full-color bulb or so and each one individually connects to the home's wifi so there's no need for a hub or anything. The app works fine on my iPhone.
odiroot 4y ago
This actually makes so much sense, as opposed to changing the colours on your laptop/phone. You want your electronic devices to just be darker, while preserving the original colours. While making your LED lamps warmer is more pleasant to the eyes, without affecting how you view your screens.
- Marsymars 4y ago
  FYI Apple devices by default adjust screen colour temperature based on ambient light temperature. (Branded “True Tone”.)
pkulak 4y ago
I would like to do something like this, but it would mean moving the smart bits from my switches to my bulbs, which I'm just not really willing to do. Right now, if I take a hammer to my Home Assistant server, all my lights still turn on and off at the wall. A good option might be to move to those new Inovelli Blue Zigbee switches and pair them directly with the bulbs. But I've already swapped all the switches in my house once...
lbj 4y ago
I think the sun was actually invented for this purpose
lepetitpedre 4y ago
Lights and hub from Ikea anyone? Super easy and the app works great for this.
jader201 4y ago
If you have f.lux on a Windows machine and have Hue white/color ambient lights, you can already do this: https://justgetflux.com/lighting/ https://justgetflux.com/lighting/ I have this in my office setup, and it works well. Very nice, especially this time of year when it gets dark while I'm still working.
holahola2020 4y ago
hello
holahola2020 4y ago
darkwater 4y ago
Circadian lights and dimmed (don't have color bulbs there) bathroom lights at night with motion sensor are alone a reason big enough to start this domotic journey.
syntaxing 4y ago
If you're going this route, I'm pretty sure your LED strips must be RGBWW. Standard RGB strips won't be able to match the circadian lighting needed.
fassssst 4y ago
A bought a bunch of Hue bulbs to setup auto color temperature changing, but both my wife and I found we prefer warm white at all times. Oh well.
matthewmcg 4y ago
I've used an app called Wake Up Light for a while with my Lutron dimmers and HomeKit. You set up some basic parameters and it generates a series of automations that gradually dims the light up to a specified brightness at a specified time. It makes waking up easier for me when it's dark outside.
hermanb 4y ago
https://hueblog.com/2022/07/16/natural-light-new-function-now-available-in-the-hue-app/ https://hueblog.com/2022/07/16/natural-light-new-function-no...
liotier 4y ago
A mix of 5500°k high-CRI LED and CFL in every room. Night is when I switch them off. Bang-bang control for the circadian rhythm !
aaron695 4y ago
clktmr 4y ago
There are light bulbs that will automatically decrease light temperature when they are dimmed (e.g. Phillips with "Warm Glow"). There is no use case for either warm bright or cold dim light. Made the installation much simpler for me, because you can use standard dimmers without an extra communication path for CCT.
xwowsersx 4y ago
I would love to do this, but without running my own machines and doing all the hacking (as fun and educational as that seems like it would be!) What is the easiest route to getting lighting throughout the house to match circadian rhythm?
Havoc 4y ago
Didn't realize there was an automation for it - neat.
ceefan 4y ago
If you would like to achieve this based on simple dimming, or even better, by using smart switches instead of smart bulbs, take a look at NASA spinoff Bios Lighting. Here's their A19 (normal bulb) specsheet: https://bioslighting.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/BIOS_A19_SpecSheet_v2.pdf https://bioslighting.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/BIOS_A19... There is also a spotlight-style BR30: https://bioslighting.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/BIOS_BR-30_SpecSheet_v5.pdf https://bioslighting.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/BIOS_BR-...
MontaeSwift 4y ago
ChrisArchitect 4y ago
[dupe]? This was submitted multiple times ago when it came out a month ago
anikom15 4y ago
What’s the value? Sunlight is free for daytime, and soft white bulbs are cheaper than smart bulbs for nighttime. Traditional timers, switches, and the clapper can add ‘automation’ if necessary.
thealch3m1st 4y ago
Was doing this with HomeKit and Philips hue years ago.
dbttdft 4y ago
You could have saved all this trouble and just used time-tested incandescent bulbs. No offense but this whole article and thread is just getting each other to buy stupid crap. LED lights have far more problems than color temperature not matching the circadian rhythm (if that's even a problem... I just avoid blue light in general). 99% of them flicker, even without a dimmer, and most probably have bad color rendering qualities (CRI) too. In my experience, they're all too cold. They'll also be too dim yet still give you that "getting blinded" feeling. I visited a $7500 apartment and it was laughable how they included LEDs that flicker at somewhere around 60-100Hz. I just stopped using LEDs until I understand the market more, after already wasting hundreds on failed attempts to find an acceptable LED. For now sticking with warm color temperature incandescent bulbs, which are almost perfect. I don't need to raise the color temperature in the day.
- ianlevesque 4y ago
  > No offense but this whole article and thread is just getting each other to buy stupid crap. This is what home automation is. If there's any truly practical use beyond not overwatering a lawn that you should probably replace with native flora anyway I've never seen one. But this project is super cool! I enjoyed the read, also enjoy excessive automation with home assistant as a hobby, and thank you OP for sharing. We need more joy of tech for the sake of joy of tech.
- scrollaway 4y ago
  As if incandescent lights aren't plagued with a lithany of issues of their own... Electricity consumption, waste heat, short lifetime, ... Not to mention much less control over color temperature; you get what you get. With LED you just have more choice. OK, you visited an expensive apartment which put no thought into its lighting. So? It'd have been a better experience if they'd put no thought into their lighting but used incandescent bulbs instead?
  - dbttdft 4y ago
    > It'd have been a better experience if they'd put no thought into their lighting but used incandescent bulbs instead? Yes.
4gotunameagain 4y ago
Some years ago when I lived in the north, I built probably the shoddiest circadian lighting that exists (and still operates). It is an ESP board with some MOSFETS soldered on a perf board, connected to a huge RGBW LED strip and powered by a beefy power supply I found. 230V cables barely covered and the perf board naked to the elements. The ESP hosts a page that displays sliders to control the light, which send a websocket command to change the PWM duty cycle. I implemented a lamp temperature to RGB that I found on God knows where, and then had a python script on a raspberry pi to slowly raise brightness and color temperature for sunrise etc by sending directly the websocket commands. It is a single C++ arduino file with all the html and Javascript as big char arrays. It is horrendous. But hey, been running for years and I know I will never touch the code again anyway :)
spdy 4y ago
Currently doing this for my new home. Using DALI as control-bus for our lights with products from Kiteo for tunable white they can go from 1.8k-16k with an CRI > 90 and be dimmable from 1%-100% as added benefit they can display the full RGB level aswell. HCL is a very niche topic for residential lightning and certainly more expensiv than going with Hue but im betting that high quality HCL will improve our lives especially during winter seasons.
- Aaron2222 4y ago
  What do you use to control it?
  - spdy 4y ago
    KNX as Cabled Smart Home which talks to the DALI-Bus via a KNX-Dali-Gateway. And Home Assistant will control the dimming and light temperature via KNX.
bashtoni 4y ago
Relevant article from The Onion: https://www.theonion.com/woman-who-drinks-6-cups-of-coffee-per-day-trying-to-cut-1819579770 https://www.theonion.com/woman-who-drinks-6-cups-of-coffee-p...
sand500 4y ago
Reminds me of the moonlighting on modern airliners. Blue to calm you down and warm reds to ell your body to sleep
omginternets 4y ago
This is a big part of what I like about sleeping in the bush. You suddenly rediscover what it means to be embedded in natural cycles: feeling fresh in the morning, sleepy in the evening, lethargic on a rainy day, hungry 3-4 times a day, etc. It's incredible how quickly it comes back, and how good our modern infrastructure is at deregulating it.
js2 4y ago
I'm doing this with HomeKit, Homebridge and Nanoleaf A19 bulbs. It's cool having my basement office lighting switch to evening mode (they dim slightly), have the color temp adjust, all at the same time my Mac switches from light mode to dark mode. HomeKit is pretty powerful if you're willing to bolster it with Homebridge and use an alternate app for configuring it (I use Controller for HomeKit). For example: I have an automation that opens/closes my garage door as I arrive/depart as long as my phone is in CarPlay mode. Yes, I could push the button on my rear view mirror, but it's one less thing to do. Glueing this together required a Personal Automation that updates a Homebridge dummy switch which tracks my phone's CarPlay status. Then I could make a HomeKit automation which triggers on my phone's location but only when the switch that track its CarPlay status is on. That said, as a developer, I do sometimes wonder why I'm not just using Home Assistant.
- azinman2 4y ago
  How do you know if it should open or close the garage? Does it open when you start the car? How quickly does it open the garage when you get home? I’d be very interested to see the actual code of this as I’d like something similar. That said, CarPlay gives me a button to open/close the garage (which I have linked via Homebridge to my garage door opener, works 70% of the time). I just wish it was better tied to the alarm system.
  - js2 4y ago
    > How do you know if it should open or close the garage? I just have the automation to open when I arrive home and to close when I leave home. Arrive and leave are built-in HomeKit triggers for automations. > Does it open when you start the car? Nope, for that I press the button on the wall inside my garage as I'm walking to my car. I want the garage door open before I start the car. > How quickly does it open the garage when you get home? Based on using "when I arrive home" the door opens when I'm about 30 seconds away, maybe 500 yards? HomeKit also has location based triggers where you can draw the circle different sizes. I just used the canned "arrive home" and "leave home" triggers. > That said, CarPlay gives me a button to open/close the garage (which I have linked via Homebridge to my garage door opener, works 70% of the time). The point of this was to avoid interaction, otherwise I'd use the button on my rear-view mirror which on my Mazda is more accessible than the CarPlay button on the Mazda display. > I’d be very interested to see the actual code of this I've got a pair of dummy switches in Homebridge: 1. "Phone CarPlay Status" 2. "Garage Door Trigger" I have two personal automations (via the Shortcuts app) on my iPhone: 1. When CarPlay connects -> Set "Phone CarPlay Status" to On 2. When CarPlay disconnects -> Set "Phone CarPlay Status" to Off. I have the following HomeKit automations: 1. When I Arrive Home and Phone CarPlay Status is On, set Garage Door Trigger to On. 2. When I Leave Home and Phone CarPlay Status is On, set Garage Door Trigger to Off. 3. When Garage Door Trigger Turns On set Garage Door Target Door State Open 4. When Garage Door Trigger Turns Off set Garage Door Target Door State Closed. The last two automations (3) and (4) are needed because a door is a secure accessory and those require confirmation if added directly to an automation. But if you trigger them via a dummy switch, you can avoid the confirmation. I used the Meross Garage Door Opener to make my 2004 Wayne Dalton openers HomeKit aware. I'm running a pair of garage doors off of it actually.
oski 4y ago
Wyze smart bulbs have a sun match feature
nathan_f77 4y ago
Adaptive Lighting is also a good option for Home Assistant: https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting I've automated all the lights in my house using Zigbee switch / dimmer modules behind the light switches on the wall. This was a very affordable option, but unfortunately I can't change the color. I can only turn lights on and off or change the brightness. I'll have to think about getting some ceiling lights with adjustable color temperature whenever I move to a new house. One thing I really like about my current system is that it still works without any internet or network connection, or if my Home Assistant server is offline. The light switches just function normally. I think this would be a bit more complicated with controllable ceiling lights, but it could probably be done via Zigbee binding and a Zigbee wall switch.
mannykannot 4y ago
Even though I use and like ‘circadian’ lighting schemes, I am rather skeptical that modulating the spectrum of artificial light will do much to counteract the most blatant abuse of the natural circadian rhythm in modern life, which is to stay active for many hours after sunset.
entropy47 4y ago
I can't work out how this could actually work (if your smart color changing lights are just paired with regular switches). 1. It's midday, your lights are bright and blue 2. You turn the switch off. The bulb (and ESP) no longer has power. 3. It's 9pm; you turn the light on. Would you not get bright blue light for a second or two until it had a chance to sync? You can get timely local execution with something like Tasmota but it has no consistent internal clock, so you're at least one network hop away from it taking proper state.
simonjgreen 4y ago
The Adaptive Lighting integration for Home Assistant has been doing this for years (https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting)
vermaat 4y ago
I tried the 'Circadian lighting component' before on my Home Assistant setup. However, the component made my lose control over certain devices (even though I configured it that I should be able to override the temp/brightness settings). It either kept lights off when I turned them manually on, or visa versa. So now I just reverted back to 'Automations' per room that are triggered by motion sensors and activate one of the predefined scenes. Each room has aprox 3 scenes: day, after sunset, and night. The automation trigger the scenes based on predefined times. I agree with the author that it's really great to not get blinded by bathroom lights in the middle of the night. The automated motion activated scenes per room/ time also give a very luxurious effect when e.g. entering the living room in the evening and it automatically toggles a cozy dimmed light scene.
mavili 4y ago
'But Home Assistant papered over the vendor and hardware woes and made setup simple.' - goes on to describe the setup, that involves about 1257 steps, 37 different components, and 457 links to resources and products. Yeah, that was really simple, thanks!
h4n1 4y ago
I recently added a similar feature to the absolutely terrible code I've hacked together for controlling my smart lights[0]. I used python's astral package to get the highest and lowest sun elevations for the day, then define the lights' warmth at both, and at elevation == 0. Every 15 min a cron job sets the lights' warmth accordingly. This is for a room with very little natural light, where the lights are on most of the day. Having them respond to the position of the sun lets me still feel the rhythm of the day outside. [0]: https://git.sr.ht/~h4n1/z2m-scripts https://git.sr.ht/~h4n1/z2m-scripts
hadcoffee 4y ago
There is an entire bio study about Circadian Rhythm by Dr Scachin Panda, highly recommend if anyone interested in tap into research. I am using one of his inspired app Ontime Heath to get my health back from COVID and working remote (with it's pros/cons), https://getontimehealth.com https://getontimehealth.com.

534 points by modinfo 4y ago

On this topic, I need to replace the 2x4 flush fluorescents (ballasts are bad) in my basement. Any suggestions? Also looking for basic motion sensor to turn them off when nobody is down there.

hedora 4y ago
Bypass the ballasts (trivial if you are comfortable with AC wiring) and buy a no-ballast led tube. The company I purchased mine from went out of business. Make sure the CRI is above 90, assuming you care.

themaninthedark 4y ago

This looks amazing! I have been following home automation with a bit of skepticism, after all any fool can muck things up but to truly muck it up you require a computer and I dislike the traditional offerings due to privacy reasons. But this is something along the lines of what I would hope home assistance would do as well as being all self-hosted!

bippingchip 4y ago

While I haven’t gotten my lights set up like this, I do use home assistant, just like the author and it is simply amazing. For things like this, the setup can get quite complex, but the main benefit is that it provides a unified interface to any connected device in your home. My main use case is energy tracking: it does a marvelous job collecting and graphing data across a bunch of different sources: from the solar panels from one vendor, the semi proprietary smart meter protocol my electricity company has, weather data etc. Having all that data together in 1 place is an invaluable tool to make any investment decisions on energy improvements to our house.

runjake 4y ago
How/what are you using to monitor your smart meter?
- makr17 4y ago
  Not OP, but in my jurisdiction the smart power meters broadcast consumption as SCM at 900MHz. rtlamr https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr does a good job of receiving and decoding those broadcasts using a cheap SDR. My local water utility also broadcasts consumption as SCM+, also 900MHz. I'm able to grab both with the single SDR.
  - runjake 4y ago
    Thanks for this. I have a bunch of SDR dongles. I am going to mess with it when I get home.
- bippingchip 4y ago
  It’s always meter specific, I use the plugin and dongle as described here: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/dsmr/ https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/dsmr/ this works with a bunch but by far not all of the meter types in EU.
pimeys 4y ago
Add Node-Red to that and building automations is a breeze. And with a stick such as Conbee 2 you can control all the lights and non-light ZigBee products directly from Home Assistant. And you do not have to firewall the bridge from calling home once a minute.

mxstbr 4y ago

This reminded me of the video by DIY Perks building an "artificial sunlight" for their office: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw The amount of effort is unbelievable, but I'd love to have something like this at home. I can only imagine the impact on my productivity during winter evenings…

bsimpson 4y ago
I was at a party this weekend at a co-op where many of the rooms had no windows. I'm sure something like that would be well-appreciated. A few years back there was a philanthropist who wanted to donate housing to a university, but one of his stipulations was that everyone got their own room, and that the rooms that didn't get natural light would be outfitted with an artificial window like this.

bryanmgreen 4y ago

Excellent. I wish that Hue and LIFX would also make a physical adjustment switch/knob for color temperature.

wdewind 4y ago
I wished this too, and got close enough by buying the Hue remote switches: https://www.philips-hue.com/en-us/p/hue-dimmer-switch--latest-model-/046677562779 https://www.philips-hue.com/en-us/p/hue-dimmer-switch--lates... It turns out there are really only 3-4 different temperatures I use normally, and this allows you to switch between them. I also use the Hue timers so I frankly don't need to use this that often, but it's nice to be able to switch between both scenes and brightness levels without pulling out my phone (edit: and more importantly so people who aren't me can control the lights if they need). It's not a perfect solution: there are still some annoyances with people forgetting to leave the main switch on and only use the mounted remote, but overall I am very happy with this system.
- r2_pilot 4y ago
  >It's not a perfect solution: there are still some annoyances with people forgetting to leave the main switch on I use light switch covers. They just screw on over the switch, and have one side open so you can manually manipulate it if you want, but it prevents accidental state changes.

mgraczyk 4y ago

In San Francisco you can spot some of these at night. Look at the tall buildings, some of the windows are illuminated with a deep red.

prmoustache 4y ago
Who needs to turn the lights on to go to the bathroom in a city? My bathroom don't have shades on the windows and I get enough light from the moon reflection and the street lights to do all I need to do in a bathroom in the middle of the night. It is not like I will put on contact lenses or look for a specific skincare product in the middle of the night. I can understand night being dark when you live in the middle of nowhere. In the city not so much.
- m4jor 4y ago
  I mean if your bathroom windows were on the other side of the house or had no street lights shining into them, you wouldn't be able to see...
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    I've never seen any room with window in a city where it was completely dark during the night unless the window was closed with shutters and curtains. Even during new moon with a cloudy sky there is usually so much light pollution that it is never completely dark.
- mgraczyk 4y ago
  Not sure where you got bathroom from. The people I know who have this generally do their entire apartment. Also it gets dark here at like 5:30
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    Who would put deep red lights at 5:30? Now I am even more confused.

jupp0r 4y ago

The problem with solutions like this is that color rendering index of RGB LEDs is abysmal to the point that I can't really stand it. I ended up just using 2300K high CRI bulbs throughout.

ars 4y ago
I'm thinking of using regular bulbs with smart switches, and dim them, and then add a bit of red light from a color-led strip. I think that would have the same effect, without needing those specialized bulbs.
dotancohen 4y ago
Bulb suggestions welcome!
- jupp0r 4y ago
  https://store.waveformlighting.com/products/lux24-circadian-led-bulb-2400k-95-cri-e26-a19-led-filament-bulb https://store.waveformlighting.com/products/lux24-circadian-...
  - dotancohen 4y ago
    Thank you! They don't seem to have E27 bulbs, but I've actually come across their blog before looking for information.

AdamJacobMuller 4y ago

I've been doing this for years with Lifx bulbs: https://github.com/adamjacobmuller/lifx/ https://github.com/adamjacobmuller/lifx/ Works really well. Lifx bulbs have excellent CRI (proper color temperature adjustments, not just fumbling with RGB) the only downside being they are not cheap. Worth it IMO though.

citruscomputing 4y ago
I'm seeing 80 CRI on their website, which isn't great.
CharlesW 4y ago
Apple's supported this for a while via HomeKit Adaptive Lighting as well. It's great that it's becoming more ubiquitous!
- tshaddox 4y ago
  Yeah, that was released with iOS 14 in September 2020. There's very little official information or documentation I can find on it, but it's mentioned here: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/control-accessories-iph0a717a8fd/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/control-accessories-i...
- fotta 4y ago
  I wish I could adjust the curve though. It's still too white in the evenings for me.
  - AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
    This is part of why I wrote my own software to do this. Lifx kinda had the feature implemented (I do no like how theirs works) but also the curve was not great. Too dim in daytime, too bright at 2am.

jefftk 4y ago

> In the evenings, after the sun sets, the lights dim, and it gets harder to read and work on projects—that’s a feature. It’s a signal that it’s time for bed. Here in Boston the sun will set at 4:30 today, but that's way too early to be starting to send my body "time to go to bed" signals.

hypfer 4y ago
Yep. Same. I got so angry reading that utterly dumb quoted statement that I finally found the motivation to sit down and write a PR to fix that issue. Starting with adaptive_lighting 1.2.0, it is possible to specify a max_sunrise_time and/or min_sunset_time that ensures that the virtual sun always rises at at most a specific time and sets at at least another specific time. Basically, you can pin your virtual day to have at least e.g. 12 hours of daylight with optionally even more based on the real sun.

jonah 4y ago

Did you know that the actual, original, F.lux works with Philips Hue! https://justgetflux.com/lighting/ https://justgetflux.com/lighting/

philihp 4y ago
This should have always been a feature of the Hue bulbs. Might have been able to justify the cost, but now they're just 4x the cost of competitors that don't need a hub.
- hermanb 4y ago
  It is a feature of the Hue bulbs being worked upon, see: https://hueblog.com/2022/07/16/natural-light-new-function-now-available-in-the-hue-app/ https://hueblog.com/2022/07/16/natural-light-new-function-no...
- carlmr 4y ago
  Which ones that don't need a hub can you recommend? I'd like to have a sunrise simulation in my bedroom, so I only need one lamp like this, and the Hue system seems to complicated for that use case. Ideally it should be a strong lamp. Like a 100W equivalent LED bulb.
Semaphor 4y ago
Kinda. I never managed to get it to work. I then tried it with home assistant a few years ago, until I finally stopped using both f.lux and leaving my lights on yellow anyway ;)

_yb2s 4y ago

I don't really see an advantage to this over just installing fixed warm color temperature lights in the house. Depends on the building I suppose, but a well designed house should have enough natural light to only use the lights at the time when you would want 'warm.' If you live in at high latitude and need a 'SAD' light for morning and daytime use, that will always be a different light fixture and system, and therefore doesn't require this type of setup either. Ultimately, regular indoor lights just aren't bright enough to engage the biological response of daylight, regardless of color temperature.

AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
From lookin on amazon, SAD lights seem to be ~10k lux. I have 8*Lifx BR-30 at 1100 Lux each in my kitchen/living room. Seems pretty close.
- ianburrell 4y ago
  SAD lights are used at distance of 1-2 ft to get that brightness. Your bulbs are probably 1100 lumen. Lumen and lux are different. Specifying lux requires specifying the distance or area. 8800 lumen on ceiling would be more like 800 lux at normal distance. Which is a bright room but not sunlight bright which is needed for SAD.
fy20 4y ago
Maybe in California you don't need this, but in the northern half of Europe (i.e. Germany and above) the weather this time of year is pretty abysmal. My office has floor to ceiling glass on three sides, but today at 2pm we had to turn on the lights because it was so cloudy and dark. The 10kWp of solar on my roof produced 2kWh today. I agree that most indoor lights are not bright enough, but that's mainly because there hasn't been an easy way to regulate them. There's no reason why you can't light your living space to 500 or more lux (most living rooms are barely 150 lux) at 6500k and regulate it down at night, and something like this makes it easy to do.
- PaulHoule 4y ago

matai_kolila 4y ago

F.lux has always bothered me, because despite their very large volume of supporting papers[0], what I've never seen is a consistent link between the "blue light" from those many studies directly back to my real computer/tablet/phone screen. I wish there were more studies done with computer monitors, rather than light boxes directly. [0] https://justgetflux.com/research.html https://justgetflux.com/research.html

Loocid 4y ago
I haven't looked at their list of papers but if they have evidence that blue light affects sleep, why would reducing the blue light coming off your phone/monitor NOT affect sleep? I don't really see why the source of the light would be important to the results.
- goodbecause1 4y ago
  There is conclusive evidence that blue light does not affect sleep in any way as large as people expect. We're talking about 1 minute on average change in sleep duration. Here is a simple search on real trials: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?term=blue+light+sleep&Search=Apply&recrs=e&age_v=&gndr=&type=&rslt= https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?term=blue+light+sleep... In my opinion: The f.lux guy is intellectually dishonest. He's been at it long enough. He's got a lot of axes to grind. I don't see any trials in https://justgetflux.com/research.html https://justgetflux.com/research.html. f.lux use by normal people and other similar stuff is a good canary for how sophisticated a person is. Many, many adults suffer from going to bed too early, not too late, especially older adults, a huge number, millions. People have been trying blue light as an intervention for them, and it doesn't work.
  - Loocid 4y ago
    >f.lux use by normal people and other similar stuff is a good canary for how sophisticated a person is. What do you mean by this? Personally I find warmer colours easier on the eyes, especially in dark rooms. Nothing to do with sleep.
  - 4y ago

noobface 4y ago

Done this for the past 6 years running a combo of cheap zwave color temp adjusting lights, smart things, and a smart things app automation called circadian daylight. Guide/Forum: https://community.smartthings.com/t/circadian-daylight-smartthings-smart-bulbs/13623?page=11 https://community.smartthings.com/t/circadian-daylight-smart... Makes the evenings more laid back and I'm able to sleep a bit easier. Well worth the effort to get it setup.

AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
What kind of bulbs are you using? Most of the z-wave ones I found do not have great CRI and the cheap ones generally don't support white color temperature at all (falling back on some RGB).
- mozman 4y ago
  I have recessed lighting in my home with non-serviceable LEDs. I would love to find a replacement that supports multiple color temperatures. Suggestions solicited!
  - Marsymars 4y ago
    My house has recessed LEDs throughout with hardware switches to control the colour temperature between five options. My approach has been to set colour temperature based on room (warmer in living rooms, basement, cooler in kitchen, etc.). I then use separate lamps or light fixtures to fill in where I want different colour temperatures. (Bedrooms and offices have ceiling fans with warm lights as well as some hue lights with colour temp that changes based on time, kitchen and dining room have warmer pendant lights / chandelier, etc.) Some manufacturers make dumb bulbs that dim-to-warm, which are very nice for some applications. (Dim-to-warm recessed LEDs exist, but they weren’t optimal for my application.)
  - AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
    I just replaced everything with high-hats. The decision was made easier when the living room ceiling collapsed on me.

xoa 4y ago

Lighting was the first and still most meaningful smarthome thing I've done, though I did it much more manually. Hue bulbs don't require any sort of WAN link, the hub(s) will work fine purely via LAN (though without firmware updates sadly without opening a hole), and of course one can then remote in with a VPN (via a bounce/mesh if you don't have a fixed IP) like anything else LAN-based. And 3rd party apps can seamlessly deal with multiple hubs. This is a fun read because I've been considering moving to Home Assistant, primarily because I'm worried about what happens when the hubs inevitably fail. 10+ years after its launch Philips has still never bothered to implement and backup/restore functionality(!!!), so that's a real driver. But in terms of pure functionality it's worked very well to code up a bunch of manual timers and time-of-day-based options on switches. And in terms of QoL impact it's been a pretty big deal for us. For context I live near the Canadian border, so not Alaska-level in terms of differences in night/day over the course of a year but far enough north that it does vary quite a lot. Being able to have a whole "sunrise" scene for the house, to have "daylight" with varying use of color and brightness (I've added 2 or 3 way bulb systems to a bunch of lamps to deal with Hue color bulbs not having as much brightness range as would be ideal), and warmth at night has made it so much easier to maintain proper sleep cycles. Rather then an audible alarm, I have a 15-minute animation of "sunrise" I put together that gently wakes me up and by the time it's getting to the whiter/bluer portion I'm set, I head down without any grogginess even when it's still black out. This all works for motion sensors too, and I've been able to massively cut down blue light emission and emission period of outdoor light at night without compromising safety and that I think is quite important for wildlife. There has been research on rampant blue light (and artificial light in general) affecting insect populations, which are under pressure anyway. I think Smart Home kit is powerful and can be (and certainly has been) misused. I will not touch anything with any sort of internet requirement, I segment things onto their own VLANs, and I'd be more cautious about it for things without the same visible indicators or with more potential side effects. But it has a real place too, and lighting is a perfect use case. I hope efforts like Matter pan out, the real issue is how vertically tied a lot of stacks are.

chem83 4y ago

While I'm a die-hard LED bulb consumer for its obvious longevity and efficiency advantages, I always wonder whether their seemingly invisible flickering messes up more with my well-being than the lack of light temperature and light brightness controls would. Would be nice to see some research on this.

outworlder 4y ago
Since when LED bulbs flicker?
- function_seven 4y ago
  A lot of cheaper ones do half-wave rectification on the mains voltage, so they flicker at 60hz (or 50hz). Slightly "better" ones will do full-wave rectification but no smoothing, so they flicker at 120hz (or 100hz). A crap ton of decorative "Edison-style" bulbs have this cheap or non-existant circuitry in them. Buying from Amazon is a huge gamble. I have slow-mo video of disappointing lights. The quality bulbs will power the LEDs from a smooth DC voltage and not flicker.
  - saiya-jin 4y ago
    Exactly this - in age of most decent phones having no issue recording 1000fps videos, just record one with your lights. Heck even 240fps is enough. Suddenly those nice lights may not seem so nice anymore. I wouldn't be surprised if this has some quiet smallish long term negative effect on our brains and eyes. In same vein as 24fps-is-enough-for-everybody was a lie
dbttdft 4y ago
Wave a knife around in your kitchen with flickering lights. You'll see that the effect is not invisible, but an edge case. Just like with flickering LEDs on vehicles, you can't tell right away exactly where the vehicle is. Just having a flickering light on the edge of your peripheral gives you the same alert feeling when an object is moving fast near you, such as a fly. Also, flickering room light probably interferes with rendering of moving objects on a computer / TV screen (though the effect would be subtle and the bugs in the computer would drown them out).

Duhck 4y ago

I started a company to pursue circadian lighting (called Twist) and sadly pivoted away from it as a core value proposition because of weak reception from the market. I feel we were 20 years too early (we shut down about 5 years ago). Our tech enabled smart circadian lighting (we called it adaptive lighting) without configuration, an app, or wifi. The lightbulbs worked without any smart gadgetry necessary. Every time the switch turned on the light made a 20 ms computation based on the time it stored (via a low power clock and a super cap) and turned to the right brightness and color temperature automatically. This was protected by a patent but also could not find a buyer for the tech despite how differentiated it was Now I have an entire home with hue downlights + bulbs that does circadian lighting (with HASS as well) and while its not nearly as elegant of a solution as Twist (aforementioned startup), it is pretty great and a huge life changer to me and my fiancè. Edit: for context we use Philips Hue downlight retrofits + bulbs in other fixtures, all white ambiance, and Lutron Aurora dimmers, connected to HASS on a RBPI, running adaptive lighting from HACS

Duhck 4y ago
Adding our failed Series A pitch deck because I think its interesting for this crowd: https://docsend.com/view/bm5za5w https://docsend.com/view/bm5za5w
- maximilianroos 4y ago
  Impressive deck! Why didn't the raise succeed?
- dmix 4y ago
  That sounds amazing (insert Fry throwing money meme). It's too bad it didn't work out. I wonder if there's been any success stories where an idea failed but then later the founder tried again? I'm guessing usually the first experience burns them out they probably dont bother again.
- pedalpete 4y ago
  That's a seriously great deck. Did you do a public post-mortem of why you think you were unable to raise?

jamesdwilson 4y ago

Is there any evidence F.lux and similar actually do anything other than make pretty lights? I mean, that's fine enough if that's what you want but I often hear health or sleep claims made. Are those substantiated in any way?

JStanton617 4y ago
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352721821000607?dgcid=coauthor https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23527... tl;dr - for the core phone/laptop F.lux use case, no, it isn't substantiated
- dbttdft 4y ago
  What do you mean? That article says the claim is false. LCD monitors emit blue light whether you want it or not anyway. Merely setting something in the OS to change the color temperature does not eliminate blue light and I don't think it even necessary changes the color temperature.
naasking 4y ago
Yes, blue light exposure worsens sleep quality: https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-has-a-dark-side https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-ha... We kind of even know why, because of blue light receptors in our eyes linked to hormones released in the morning to increase alertness. This is linked to the light spectrum seen at sunrise.

AceJohnny2 4y ago

FWIW, Apple HomeKit + Hue has supported this for a few years (fall 2020?), they call it Adaptive Lighting, and for me this has been a killer app. It's kind of a bummer that Hue doesn't support it natively, but since I was already in the Homekit ecosystem, it was fine for me. I've paired this with powerful Sowilo [1] light strips, which have excellent warm/daylight white range and brightness, and it's kept S.A.D. in relative check. [1] https://sowilodesign.com https://sowilodesign.com I'm sure some people can come up with a cheaper solution via AliExpress than Sowilo's, but having a turnkey solution that integrated with Hue was essential for me.

odysseus 4y ago
Adaptive Lighting also works with the cheaper Philips Wiz bulbs, provided you use HomeBridge. ( I'm using this plugin for Wiz support: https://github.com/kpsuperplane/homebridge-wiz-lan#readme https://github.com/kpsuperplane/homebridge-wiz-lan#readme ) There's probably a Home Assistant plugin too ... Wiz bulbs will also be getting Matter support within the next year, so we'll be able to add them to HomeKit "natively".
- yurishimo 4y ago
  I haven't found anything to suggest that Philips owns or operates the Wiz brand? Where did you find that information? More for my own curiosity than anything.
  - tonygrue 4y ago
    https://www.wizconnected.com/en-us/about-wiz https://www.wizconnected.com/en-us/about-wiz and https://www.signify.com/en-us https://www.signify.com/en-us Wiz joined Signify in 2019. Signify is the new name for Philips Lighting (post spin out from Philips).
drewbitt 4y ago
HomeKit adaptive lighting requires an always-at-home iPad or Apple TV to set it up. Until I have those I find manually setting a large amount of Hue schedules at various times to be OK.

proee 4y ago

How about a pair of goggles with a filter that can dynamically adjust the amount and color of light that gets through to your eyes. So, no matter what the environment you're in, your eye always get the right light at the right time?

diimdeep 4y ago

I am testing atm theory that cycling environment color temperature from cold to warm and back to cold in 90 seconds boost your performance in monotonic work by at least 15%. There is some old publication somewhere accoring to my sources, but I could not find it.

Scene_Cast2 4y ago

I'm currently looking to retrofit my place with variable color temperature lights. In industry parlance, it's is called "Tunable White". On one hand, non-hobbyist industry has a ton of great hardware options. High CRI, high R9, guaranteed lack of white point drift, 0.1%-100% dimming (although 85 CRI and 10-100% is most of what you'd typically find at Home Depot), etc. My issue is that there are several competing control standards (with 0-10V being the more common but primitive one for America), and plenty of them (like PoE Ethernet lighting - super cool IMHO) are very much commercial-only. And stuff like Lutron's RadioRA is quite proprietary, with not much interoperability. On the other hand, going with Phillips Hue or similar will lock me into that ecosystem - which also dictates which lights and switches I could use.

function_seven 4y ago
> On the other hand, going with Phillips Hue or similar will lock me into that ecosystem - which also dictates which lights and switches I could use. Good news, there's no lock in with Hue. I have about 20 of those bulbs around my house and they all work great with the generic Zigbee coordinator attached to my Home Assistant box. I don't use the Hue Hub, nor do I use the app. Alongside those bulbs I have another 15-ish Sengled bulbs that also speak Zigbee. They're cheaper and similar in quality, but the color temps don't get as low as Hue. (2700K vs. 2200K on the Hue) Only caveat with the Hue bulbs is that if you need to reset them for any reason, you'll need either a Hue Hub or one of their dimmers to do that. So I guess there's a little lock-in on that front, but it's not an ecosystem thing where you're stuck.
atrainedmonkey 4y ago
To avoid vendor lockin you can run an install of Home Assistant with a Deconz zigbee USB dongle, which can then act as a hub for a massive range of zigbee devices. including Phillips hue, but I use Ikea’s Tradfri bulbs at a third of the price.
the_pwner224 4y ago
Philips Hue operates over Zigbee so there isn't vendor lock in. Like you, I've also had exposure to the high end industrial LED emitters, but using those at home is hard. I ended up going with Ikea TRADFRI bulbs, they are much cheaper than Hue (USD 9-13 each) and don't seem to be any worse than the Hue bulbs. Ikea also sells Tradfri buttons (switches to control the bulbs) and motion sensors. And not relevant for this, but also Tradfri controllable power outlets. I'm using a Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 dongle (available on ebay for $20, uses a TI Zigbee chip) plugged into a small single board computer server. Zigbee2MQTT is FOSS software which interfaces with the Zigbee dongle and manages the Zigbee network. You can pair devices to the network with with its web GUI. Zigbee2MQTT allows you to control the devices over MQTT, a lightweight messaging protocol. I wrote a Python script for this. It connects to MQTT and listens for messages from the buttons (on, off, brightness up/down, CCT up/down). When it gets a message from a button or motion sensor, the script sends a MQTT command to the relevant bulb / group of bulbs. My setup is all Ikea Tradfri, but I could very easily add in Hue bulbs or other Zigbee devices such as ones from Aqara or Sonoff. I just purchased a Zigbee thermostat but haven't gotten around to setting it up yet. The whole thing works without internet access. Though you could expose the MQTT server to the internet and set up a method to control your devices when away from home. The main risk is that the industry moves past Zigbee. It's already moving to Thread & Matter, but I've only done a bit of research into that. I think Zigbee will be supported and products will continue to be available for a while. Or a self-hosted Thread software might also end up existing. The tradfri bulbs don't dim to 0.1% but they get pretty dim. And your control software could do things like selectively turn off certain bulbs in a room as you command it to lower brightnesses. The CCT range is good enough for me. The Tradfri bulbs are specified as >90 CRI. They don't flicker.

dayyan 4y ago

2700K 90+ CRI bulbs + Dimmer

kefabean 4y ago
some hi-CRI bulbs even lower the colour temperature to mimic incandescents when dimmed.
cycrutchfield 4y ago
Dimmer + Philips Warm Glow 2200K-2700K bulb

evanlivingston 4y ago

I use incandescent and halogen everywhere and don't have a problem with color temperature. Also, the CRI of my bulbs is incredible. My house has maybe 20 light bulbs in it, most of them under 75 watts, except for a couple of strategic halogen fixtures. Sometimes I think about getting LED smart lighting, but then I think about how many iterations of setups I would have to go through it get everything dialed in, all the e-waste I would be contributing to, all the plastic, all the security vulnerabilities, all the software updates, all the glitches, all the flicker from cheap PWD circuitry and I decide to stick with simple glass and red hot metal.

Marsymars 4y ago
> I use incandescent and halogen everywhere and don't have a problem with color temperature. Well, you might not have a problem, but some people like colour temperatures >3000K. > Sometimes I think about getting LED smart lighting, but then I think about how many iterations of setups I would have to go through it get everything dialed in, all the e-waste I would be contributing to, all the plastic, all the security vulnerabilities, all the software updates, all the glitches, all the flicker from cheap PWD circuitry and I decide to stick with simple glass and red hot metal. I’ve found a lot of that hassle is mitigated by getting high-end dumb LED bulbs, paired with reliable smart switches (only where specifically required for automation purposes) from a traditional lighting manufacturer with long support periods. (Lutron.)
Syonyk 4y ago
On top of that, even the "warm" color temperature LEDs put out a pretty good spike of blue light. I'm working on some analysis of this, and even the "warm glow" sort... yeah, there's a ton of blue. Right in the realm of spectrum that convinces our body it's day. So I'm not sure that the whole color shifting makes a big difference if you don't get rid of the blue as well. White LEDs are generally blue LEDs with phosphor coatings, but they still leak the blue. It's quite annoying. I've been going back to incandescents and they're properly nice in the evenings.
- dbttdft 4y ago
  > On top of that, even the "warm" color temperature LEDs put out a pretty good spike of blue light. That's what I figured. LCD monitors are all painful for me to look at as well.

teslabox 4y ago

In the beginning of Electric Light, all bulbs were 2500K (incandescent). Mercury Vapor lights started getting used outdoors, but eventually the lighting industry figured out High Pressure Sodium (blue-free), and Low Pressure Sodium (pure orange) for outdoor lighting. Halogens can be tuned, I think... Some Halogens are 3000K. Automotive halogens are much more orange/yellow than the halogens I have in my ceiling fan. The two essential tools for creating a tolerable light in our modern world are dimmer switches and the using safe color temperatures for LED light sources. > The most significant benefit I’ve noticed is that I can get back to sleep after getting up in the middle of the night—now that I’m no longer blinded by harsh overhead light in the bathroom. My bathroom has too much light most of the time. If I was "working on my makeup" the amount of light would be just right, but that's not me. I bought my first dimmer switch at Habitat for Humanity. It was the kind that has a little lever next to the on/off switch - basically you decide on the amount of light, then it's pre-set to that amount. The Habitat dimmer switch was okay, but I'd still walk into the bathroom from a black hallway and blind myself, as I never checked the light level before hitting the switch. On surveying the dimmers at Home Depot, I settled on the kind that starts "off", and gradually increases the light level. My other dimmer switches are the classic round-dimmer option, and one that has a button and a big 'how much light do you want' .... "slide": https://www.homedepot.com/b/Electrical-Wiring-Devices-Light-Controls-Dimmers/Slide/N-5yc1vZc34iZ1z17l41 https://www.homedepot.com/b/Electrical-Wiring-Devices-Light-... I have three bedroom light switches. Ceiling fan light has halogen bulbs with a slide dimmer. Outlet switch has a deep red LED bulb in a table lamp. There was a 5000K fluorescent above the closet that I replaced with a fixture from the thrift store, that has a mix of orange and red bulbs. The kitchen has horrible hanging lights over the stove. Someone installed 3000K LED bulbs. I replaced these with incandescents and halogens, and installed a dimmer, but they were all terrible. Eventually I found some 2000K "Amber" Philips LED bulbs. These work with my LED dimmer, and are tolerable. With the Amber bulbs at least you're not staring into an artificial sun. If it was up to me, I'd get rid of the hanging lights and go back to the 90's light canisters in the ceiling. tl/dr: Good lighting is invisible. Bad lighting forces people to stare into artificial suns. "5000K" light sources are for plants, NOT people. To protect eyes, slide dimmers that always start with the minimum amount of light are the greatest.

bravoetch 4y ago

jedberg 4y ago

Ha, I've been doing this manually for years. I found smart lights that could get as low as 1850k and then put them in key areas in the house. After the kids go to bed, I try to limit all lighting to 1850K (as well as using that color temp on all screens that I use at night). Of course I'm just one person so it's all anecdotal, but it definitely has helped my sleep in a noticeable way since I did it.

yamtaddle 4y ago
Cutting total light down a lot helps, too. The 60-75 watt (incandescent or equivalent) standard for lights—often with several such bulbs active per room, even—is way brighter than needed. Dropping room light to only enough to navigate the room safely, and using slightly-brighter (but still nowhere near 60 watt) lamps, either hand-portable or in particular locations, makes a huge difference, and you can still do almost anything in that kind of lighting. Once you get used to much lower lighting at night, ordinary whole-room lighting seems insane. Why try to make it as bright as day at night? You can read, play board and card games, play music, even draw or something like that, with a small faction as much light as the typical house puts out when you flip the light switch in a room. And it has big effects on sleepiness (if you don't ruin it by staring at a hyper-stimulating glowing rectangle—color temp may help a little, but Internet-connected screens are sleep poison)

Terretta 4y ago

For curious buyers, this is already more or less built in: - Philips Hue + Hue Hub : the default Hue app can do this, leveraging Hue Labs "Feel better with light" that runs from the hub so you don't need a laptop or other device after the formula is installed. - Apple HomeKit Adaptive Lighting + Hue or Eve -- I'm a big fan of Eve light strips. See more accessories here: https://www.imore.com/best-accessories-with-homekit-adaptive-lighting https://www.imore.com/best-accessories-with-homekit-adaptive... Beyond those, there are other options w/o getting too tricky: - Hue + Hue Automations + LivingScenes (or similar) + shift at sundown/sunrise - Hue Labs (various other options) - Third party apps like HueDynamics, and f.lux itself - IFTTT: https://ifttt.com/connect/weather/hue https://ifttt.com/connect/weather/hue For what it's worth, the Philips Hue white bulbs that vary the white temperature are great, with a better fuller white than the full color bulbs.

rednerrus 4y ago

Am I overthinking this or can I just use the Lifx bulbs an the sunset lights routine in the Alexa app?

MattDemers 4y ago

If you're interested in HomeAssistant to solve this problem, I wrote a simpler implementation, [1] of using the sunrise/sun position sensor to change scenes for a room's lights. This didn't involve having a Zigbee hub like this post suggests, mostly because all my lights were Hue, or Zigbee-compatible (IKEA-branded Tradfri lights) that were already on my Hue bridge. I found this worked for me, since I only needed to create four automations: - What happens if the lights are turned on after/before sunset (2) - What happens if if the lights are already on after/before sunset when it changes (2) This implementation seems more around more fine adjustments to brightness/colour/colour temp, but mine's more geared towards "Is the sun down? Change the scene." [1] https://mattdemers.com/sun-specific-light-automations-with-homeassistant/ https://mattdemers.com/sun-specific-light-automations-with-h...

Sander_Marechal 4y ago
I have an even simpler setup. I have Hue lights and Ikea on/off smart toggle switches. The simple 1/0 ones, not the large 5-button ones. I created a simple setup where tapping the top "on" part will toggle between "bright" and "off", and tapping the bottom "off" part will toggle between "low red light" and "off". I use it in all my bedrooms, the living room, bathroom and toilets. At the end of the evening I just switch to red light and wind down for bed. At night I use the red light everywhere. I have a newborn and it's fantastic to be able to change him or take him downstairs for a bottle without bright light waking him too much.

joch 4y ago

I would like to recommend Adaptive Lighting in favor of Circadian Lighting. It has the added benefit of being able to detect if someone manually adjusts the brightness or color, and then stops the automatic adjustment for that light. https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting

binarysolo 4y ago

Doesn't Hue do this already with a more elegant solution? I have a Hue setup at home and I do something like this, but hackier through an iPhone app I set up 4-5 years ago (it hasn't broken yet and I haven't touched it); I believe there are more elegant software solutions these days.

rsoto 4y ago

I wish something like this existed for TVs. Since I got my eyesight procedure 10+ years ago, I soon noticed I was quite sensitive to lights that didn't affect me at all (maybe my vision was too bad to even notice, don't know). That extreme sensitivity faded off in the first six months, but I still get annoyed by some lights and the first thing I do with a new PC/Phone is setting up Redshift[1] or Twilight[2], and although I'm not a big TV consumer, the times I do watch it, I wonder if there's a market for this kind of features. 1: https://github.com/jonls/redshift https://github.com/jonls/redshift 2: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid.lux&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid...

hackerlight 4y ago
There are apps on Android TVs (as well as Android phones) that are available on Google Play Store that do this.

sublinear 4y ago

Am I the only person deeply annoyed by this trend? Indoor lights are dim enough to begin with!

clashmoore 4y ago

I use Home Depot's Wiz lightbulbs for this around my home. $10 a full-color bulb or so and each one individually connects to the home's wifi so there's no need for a hub or anything. The app works fine on my iPhone.

odiroot 4y ago

This actually makes so much sense, as opposed to changing the colours on your laptop/phone. You want your electronic devices to just be darker, while preserving the original colours. While making your LED lamps warmer is more pleasant to the eyes, without affecting how you view your screens.

Marsymars 4y ago
FYI Apple devices by default adjust screen colour temperature based on ambient light temperature. (Branded “True Tone”.)

pkulak 4y ago

I would like to do something like this, but it would mean moving the smart bits from my switches to my bulbs, which I'm just not really willing to do. Right now, if I take a hammer to my Home Assistant server, all my lights still turn on and off at the wall. A good option might be to move to those new Inovelli Blue Zigbee switches and pair them directly with the bulbs. But I've already swapped all the switches in my house once...

lbj 4y ago

I think the sun was actually invented for this purpose

lepetitpedre 4y ago

Lights and hub from Ikea anyone? Super easy and the app works great for this.

jader201 4y ago

If you have f.lux on a Windows machine and have Hue white/color ambient lights, you can already do this: https://justgetflux.com/lighting/ https://justgetflux.com/lighting/ I have this in my office setup, and it works well. Very nice, especially this time of year when it gets dark while I'm still working.

holahola2020 4y ago

hello

holahola2020 4y ago

darkwater 4y ago

Circadian lights and dimmed (don't have color bulbs there) bathroom lights at night with motion sensor are alone a reason big enough to start this domotic journey.

syntaxing 4y ago

If you're going this route, I'm pretty sure your LED strips must be RGBWW. Standard RGB strips won't be able to match the circadian lighting needed.

fassssst 4y ago

A bought a bunch of Hue bulbs to setup auto color temperature changing, but both my wife and I found we prefer warm white at all times. Oh well.

matthewmcg 4y ago

I've used an app called Wake Up Light for a while with my Lutron dimmers and HomeKit. You set up some basic parameters and it generates a series of automations that gradually dims the light up to a specified brightness at a specified time. It makes waking up easier for me when it's dark outside.

hermanb 4y ago

https://hueblog.com/2022/07/16/natural-light-new-function-now-available-in-the-hue-app/ https://hueblog.com/2022/07/16/natural-light-new-function-no...

liotier 4y ago

A mix of 5500°k high-CRI LED and CFL in every room. Night is when I switch them off. Bang-bang control for the circadian rhythm !

aaron695 4y ago

clktmr 4y ago

There are light bulbs that will automatically decrease light temperature when they are dimmed (e.g. Phillips with "Warm Glow"). There is no use case for either warm bright or cold dim light. Made the installation much simpler for me, because you can use standard dimmers without an extra communication path for CCT.

xwowsersx 4y ago

I would love to do this, but without running my own machines and doing all the hacking (as fun and educational as that seems like it would be!) What is the easiest route to getting lighting throughout the house to match circadian rhythm?

Havoc 4y ago

Didn't realize there was an automation for it - neat.

ceefan 4y ago

If you would like to achieve this based on simple dimming, or even better, by using smart switches instead of smart bulbs, take a look at NASA spinoff Bios Lighting. Here's their A19 (normal bulb) specsheet: https://bioslighting.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/BIOS_A19_SpecSheet_v2.pdf https://bioslighting.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/BIOS_A19... There is also a spotlight-style BR30: https://bioslighting.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/BIOS_BR-30_SpecSheet_v5.pdf https://bioslighting.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/BIOS_BR-...

MontaeSwift 4y ago

ChrisArchitect 4y ago

[dupe]? This was submitted multiple times ago when it came out a month ago

anikom15 4y ago

What’s the value? Sunlight is free for daytime, and soft white bulbs are cheaper than smart bulbs for nighttime. Traditional timers, switches, and the clapper can add ‘automation’ if necessary.

thealch3m1st 4y ago

Was doing this with HomeKit and Philips hue years ago.

dbttdft 4y ago

You could have saved all this trouble and just used time-tested incandescent bulbs. No offense but this whole article and thread is just getting each other to buy stupid crap. LED lights have far more problems than color temperature not matching the circadian rhythm (if that's even a problem... I just avoid blue light in general). 99% of them flicker, even without a dimmer, and most probably have bad color rendering qualities (CRI) too. In my experience, they're all too cold. They'll also be too dim yet still give you that "getting blinded" feeling. I visited a $7500 apartment and it was laughable how they included LEDs that flicker at somewhere around 60-100Hz. I just stopped using LEDs until I understand the market more, after already wasting hundreds on failed attempts to find an acceptable LED. For now sticking with warm color temperature incandescent bulbs, which are almost perfect. I don't need to raise the color temperature in the day.

ianlevesque 4y ago
> No offense but this whole article and thread is just getting each other to buy stupid crap. This is what home automation is. If there's any truly practical use beyond not overwatering a lawn that you should probably replace with native flora anyway I've never seen one. But this project is super cool! I enjoyed the read, also enjoy excessive automation with home assistant as a hobby, and thank you OP for sharing. We need more joy of tech for the sake of joy of tech.
scrollaway 4y ago
As if incandescent lights aren't plagued with a lithany of issues of their own... Electricity consumption, waste heat, short lifetime, ... Not to mention much less control over color temperature; you get what you get. With LED you just have more choice. OK, you visited an expensive apartment which put no thought into its lighting. So? It'd have been a better experience if they'd put no thought into their lighting but used incandescent bulbs instead?
- dbttdft 4y ago
  > It'd have been a better experience if they'd put no thought into their lighting but used incandescent bulbs instead? Yes.

4gotunameagain 4y ago

Some years ago when I lived in the north, I built probably the shoddiest circadian lighting that exists (and still operates). It is an ESP board with some MOSFETS soldered on a perf board, connected to a huge RGBW LED strip and powered by a beefy power supply I found. 230V cables barely covered and the perf board naked to the elements. The ESP hosts a page that displays sliders to control the light, which send a websocket command to change the PWM duty cycle. I implemented a lamp temperature to RGB that I found on God knows where, and then had a python script on a raspberry pi to slowly raise brightness and color temperature for sunrise etc by sending directly the websocket commands. It is a single C++ arduino file with all the html and Javascript as big char arrays. It is horrendous. But hey, been running for years and I know I will never touch the code again anyway :)

spdy 4y ago

Currently doing this for my new home. Using DALI as control-bus for our lights with products from Kiteo for tunable white they can go from 1.8k-16k with an CRI > 90 and be dimmable from 1%-100% as added benefit they can display the full RGB level aswell. HCL is a very niche topic for residential lightning and certainly more expensiv than going with Hue but im betting that high quality HCL will improve our lives especially during winter seasons.

Aaron2222 4y ago
What do you use to control it?
- spdy 4y ago
  KNX as Cabled Smart Home which talks to the DALI-Bus via a KNX-Dali-Gateway. And Home Assistant will control the dimming and light temperature via KNX.

bashtoni 4y ago

Relevant article from The Onion: https://www.theonion.com/woman-who-drinks-6-cups-of-coffee-per-day-trying-to-cut-1819579770 https://www.theonion.com/woman-who-drinks-6-cups-of-coffee-p...

sand500 4y ago

Reminds me of the moonlighting on modern airliners. Blue to calm you down and warm reds to ell your body to sleep

omginternets 4y ago

This is a big part of what I like about sleeping in the bush. You suddenly rediscover what it means to be embedded in natural cycles: feeling fresh in the morning, sleepy in the evening, lethargic on a rainy day, hungry 3-4 times a day, etc. It's incredible how quickly it comes back, and how good our modern infrastructure is at deregulating it.

js2 4y ago

I'm doing this with HomeKit, Homebridge and Nanoleaf A19 bulbs. It's cool having my basement office lighting switch to evening mode (they dim slightly), have the color temp adjust, all at the same time my Mac switches from light mode to dark mode. HomeKit is pretty powerful if you're willing to bolster it with Homebridge and use an alternate app for configuring it (I use Controller for HomeKit). For example: I have an automation that opens/closes my garage door as I arrive/depart as long as my phone is in CarPlay mode. Yes, I could push the button on my rear view mirror, but it's one less thing to do. Glueing this together required a Personal Automation that updates a Homebridge dummy switch which tracks my phone's CarPlay status. Then I could make a HomeKit automation which triggers on my phone's location but only when the switch that track its CarPlay status is on. That said, as a developer, I do sometimes wonder why I'm not just using Home Assistant.

azinman2 4y ago
How do you know if it should open or close the garage? Does it open when you start the car? How quickly does it open the garage when you get home? I’d be very interested to see the actual code of this as I’d like something similar. That said, CarPlay gives me a button to open/close the garage (which I have linked via Homebridge to my garage door opener, works 70% of the time). I just wish it was better tied to the alarm system.
- js2 4y ago
  > How do you know if it should open or close the garage? I just have the automation to open when I arrive home and to close when I leave home. Arrive and leave are built-in HomeKit triggers for automations. > Does it open when you start the car? Nope, for that I press the button on the wall inside my garage as I'm walking to my car. I want the garage door open before I start the car. > How quickly does it open the garage when you get home? Based on using "when I arrive home" the door opens when I'm about 30 seconds away, maybe 500 yards? HomeKit also has location based triggers where you can draw the circle different sizes. I just used the canned "arrive home" and "leave home" triggers. > That said, CarPlay gives me a button to open/close the garage (which I have linked via Homebridge to my garage door opener, works 70% of the time). The point of this was to avoid interaction, otherwise I'd use the button on my rear-view mirror which on my Mazda is more accessible than the CarPlay button on the Mazda display. > I’d be very interested to see the actual code of this I've got a pair of dummy switches in Homebridge: 1. "Phone CarPlay Status" 2. "Garage Door Trigger" I have two personal automations (via the Shortcuts app) on my iPhone: 1. When CarPlay connects -> Set "Phone CarPlay Status" to On 2. When CarPlay disconnects -> Set "Phone CarPlay Status" to Off. I have the following HomeKit automations: 1. When I Arrive Home and Phone CarPlay Status is On, set Garage Door Trigger to On. 2. When I Leave Home and Phone CarPlay Status is On, set Garage Door Trigger to Off. 3. When Garage Door Trigger Turns On set Garage Door Target Door State Open 4. When Garage Door Trigger Turns Off set Garage Door Target Door State Closed. The last two automations (3) and (4) are needed because a door is a secure accessory and those require confirmation if added directly to an automation. But if you trigger them via a dummy switch, you can avoid the confirmation. I used the Meross Garage Door Opener to make my 2004 Wayne Dalton openers HomeKit aware. I'm running a pair of garage doors off of it actually.

oski 4y ago

Wyze smart bulbs have a sun match feature

nathan_f77 4y ago

Adaptive Lighting is also a good option for Home Assistant: https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting I've automated all the lights in my house using Zigbee switch / dimmer modules behind the light switches on the wall. This was a very affordable option, but unfortunately I can't change the color. I can only turn lights on and off or change the brightness. I'll have to think about getting some ceiling lights with adjustable color temperature whenever I move to a new house. One thing I really like about my current system is that it still works without any internet or network connection, or if my Home Assistant server is offline. The light switches just function normally. I think this would be a bit more complicated with controllable ceiling lights, but it could probably be done via Zigbee binding and a Zigbee wall switch.

mannykannot 4y ago

Even though I use and like ‘circadian’ lighting schemes, I am rather skeptical that modulating the spectrum of artificial light will do much to counteract the most blatant abuse of the natural circadian rhythm in modern life, which is to stay active for many hours after sunset.

entropy47 4y ago

I can't work out how this could actually work (if your smart color changing lights are just paired with regular switches). 1. It's midday, your lights are bright and blue 2. You turn the switch off. The bulb (and ESP) no longer has power. 3. It's 9pm; you turn the light on. Would you not get bright blue light for a second or two until it had a chance to sync? You can get timely local execution with something like Tasmota but it has no consistent internal clock, so you're at least one network hop away from it taking proper state.

simonjgreen 4y ago

The Adaptive Lighting integration for Home Assistant has been doing this for years (https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting)

vermaat 4y ago

I tried the 'Circadian lighting component' before on my Home Assistant setup. However, the component made my lose control over certain devices (even though I configured it that I should be able to override the temp/brightness settings). It either kept lights off when I turned them manually on, or visa versa. So now I just reverted back to 'Automations' per room that are triggered by motion sensors and activate one of the predefined scenes. Each room has aprox 3 scenes: day, after sunset, and night. The automation trigger the scenes based on predefined times. I agree with the author that it's really great to not get blinded by bathroom lights in the middle of the night. The automated motion activated scenes per room/ time also give a very luxurious effect when e.g. entering the living room in the evening and it automatically toggles a cozy dimmed light scene.

mavili 4y ago

'But Home Assistant papered over the vendor and hardware woes and made setup simple.' - goes on to describe the setup, that involves about 1257 steps, 37 different components, and 457 links to resources and products. Yeah, that was really simple, thanks!

h4n1 4y ago

I recently added a similar feature to the absolutely terrible code I've hacked together for controlling my smart lights[0]. I used python's astral package to get the highest and lowest sun elevations for the day, then define the lights' warmth at both, and at elevation == 0. Every 15 min a cron job sets the lights' warmth accordingly. This is for a room with very little natural light, where the lights are on most of the day. Having them respond to the position of the sun lets me still feel the rhythm of the day outside. [0]: https://git.sr.ht/~h4n1/z2m-scripts https://git.sr.ht/~h4n1/z2m-scripts

hadcoffee 4y ago

There is an entire bio study about Circadian Rhythm by Dr Scachin Panda, highly recommend if anyone interested in tap into research. I am using one of his inspired app Ontime Heath to get my health back from COVID and working remote (with it's pros/cons), https://getontimehealth.com https://getontimehealth.com.