Hey community!
I’ve built my first custom Home Assistant component for creating lighting zones within an area.
Below a bit of a overview of it’s functionality.
Any questions? Just shoot!
Thanks for your time
Overview
The Lighting Zone integration allows you to group together light in a zone helper.
You can then use this helper to manipulate the brightness of these lights and gather info about them.
Why not use a light group? You might ask…
A light group in Home Assistant treats all the lights in the group as one and the same.
Meaning that all lights in the group will have the exact same color, temperature, and/or brightness.
The Lighting Zone helper does this differently. It allows you to dim all the lights in the zone, leaving their color/temperature alone.
The lighting zone supports two types of dimming through action services:
- Absolute: (
lighting_zone.dim_zone_absolute) setting a certain brightness level to all lights in the zone.- Example: Calling this service with a dimming value of
50, will set all the lights to a brightness value of50.
- Example: Calling this service with a dimming value of
- Relative: (
lighting_zone.dim_zone_relative) adjusting all the lights their brightness level relative to their current value.- Example: Calling this service with a value of
-10, will decrease every lights brightness by 10. So a light with brightness70will go down to60. While another light in the zone will go from50to40.
- Example: Calling this service with a value of
But this can be done by just calling the light.turn_on service on an area?..
That’s correct, assuming that you have scoped your areas to the lights you want to dim. For example: I have an area called ‘Living Room’ that I want to scope to the physical Living Room area within my home. But within my living room I have a seating area and a dining area. I want to dim these two areas independently based on presence within them. Here we can create two Lighting Zones for these areas.
More then just dimming
When you create a Lighting Zone it creates a binary sensor that represents it. This binary sensor will be on when any of the lights in the zone are on. And off when all lights are of.
The binary sensor entity will have a set of attributes like it’s members, the lights that are on, the lights that are off, etc…
These attributes can be used in automation.
For example: I have a button on the wall that I want to use for toggling on/off the lights in a specific zone. I can use the state of the binary sensor to determine if the lights are on or off and act accordingly. Or I can use the members_on and members_off attributes to determine how many lights are on. And then act on that.