Control the brightness and color temperature of lights (based on the time of the day)

Configuration
1

Hello everyone!
I want to control the brightness and color temperature of my light based on the time of the day.
What are the options available to achieve this?

These are the options that I’ve found so far:

  • flux
  • Adaptive lighting

Both are not ideal.
Flux sets the sunset time based on location. I don’t want that.
Adaptive lightning seems cool but is difficult to install. (You need HACS and installing that involves a lot of complicated steps.)

Does anyone know a simple method to control the lights?

2

If you’re ignoring sunrise/sunset and only working from the time of day then you could create a sensor that has different status’ per hour.

Then when running automations, either trigger off of the sensor state or use them as choice options in the actions (or scripts)

example

- sensor:
    - name: lightsbytod
      unique_id: wefewfefw-77af-4b74-ae61-482e372ea007
      icon: >
        mdi:lightbulb-outline
      state: >
        {% set time = now().hour %}
        {% if (time >= 22) %}
        lateevening
        {% elif (time >= 18) %}
        evening
        {% elif (time >= 12) %}
        afternoon
        {% elif (time >= 5) %}
        morning
        {% else %}
        overnight
        {% endif %}
3

What do you want?

4

You need some kind of a light sensor if not based on time of day or sunrise/sunset… You could easily piggyback off of a light sensor from a neighbor’s weather station (if you donb’t want to install your own or instrall your own light sensor) but then when it snows that may be covered up briefly and show it as dark in the middle of the day. If you always have your mobile phone with you you could track the light it senses whille it is being actuvely used… You could build in some “fuzzy logoic” in tnhat takes into account what other lights in the house have been turned on or when also taking into account measurements of where people currently are in the home… Depends upon exactly what you need to do - ? The complexity is the fun!

5

That seems like a reasonable option.
I will consider this one.

6

I do want it based on time of the day. =p
The complexity is indeed part of the fun.
But having the complexity in configuring the light feels like the wrong place to have complexity haha
It feels like such a basic scenario, that this should have been solved already, right?

Maybe I will add the option to flux to manually set the sunset_time.
I think with that feature added, it’s possible what I want to do.