Does Ha have a built in day/night cycle?

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The problem that I had was that I already had the code, but it was giving me an error message, and I wanted to correct it.

Nobody would even touch it, they just told me to “read the manual” and kept making these vague suggestions that ended up leading me in completely the wrong direction.

Eventually, maybe after a couple of weeks, someone turned up who actually understood what the error message meant and that the fix was very simple (I was trying to call what I thought was function using arguments from an automation, but it turned out to be a command that cannot be called using arguments).

If you post a general question on “how do I…” and no other context you are more likely to get a link to the documentation.

Yeah, please don’t do that.

One of the reasons why the open source community is seen as being so closed and elitist by non-coders is when people come to a forum like this they’ve usually already read the manual and not been able to solve their problem, and they ask generic questions because they’re not familiar enough with the system to ask a detailed technical question. So linking to the documentation is the equivalent of someone asking their couch how to become a better runner and being told “run faster”.

in effect we are all “armchair experts”

Sorry, I wasn’t clear, this is an idiom in my language. It means someone who talks about something as if they were an expert, but in truth they never get out of their chair to actually do it.

Like, someone posting a hundred comments telling people to “read the manual”, because they don’t have the knowledge to solve the problem themselves.

Anyway, 'I’m getting off topic.

The answer to my question seems to be that there is no day\night cycle in HA, but there are several ways to write your own.

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So point us to the post you are referring to. If we agree with you, we will apologise for not helping as you hoped we would.

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That sounds like a really bad idea.

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How exactly would HA “create a button” to do literally every single thing that any user could possibly want to do?

The flexibility and power of the HA system is that it gives you the framework and ability to do complex things. But that comes at a cost.

I’ve said this many other times in this forum…

you can have “easy”, “cheap” or “powerful”.

Pick two. You can never have all three. And I think I need to remove the option of “easy and powerful” from the list. Those two things are almost inevitably mutually exclusive.

yeah, please don’t do that…

we are all more than willing to help you but you have to have done your due diligence first to try to figure it out on your own. HA is not (and no matter how much the noob users/devs want it to be never will be) a simple system. it will take quite a bit of research and figuring out.

you will need to put in the basic work up front and at least try.

If you provide zero context and seem to be asking for us to hold your hand from the start then you will get a link to the docs. If after being directed to the docs you reply that you have read the docs and specify what part of the docs you are having a problem with then at that point the real learning conversation can begin.

it’s possible that “the open source community” is seen as “elitist” is that maybe the new user expects too much from us to help them and expects too little of themselves to put in the minimum effort to either read the docs (which happens way more than you think and a lot of times those users actually haven’t read the docs so the link is totally appropriate) or at least to post a “help-us-to-help-you” type of question.

But to clarify that’s not what it sounds like you did in your request so I’m not addressing your particular situation. So don’t take my references to “you/your” above as literally meaning you. I’m just addressing the generic statement you made above.

why? posting a link can’t hurt. And it will free up this thread for discussions of the actual OP.

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It wouldn’t that’s why it has a Automations and templates, as well as YAML support so that users can customise functions, and Blueprints so that they can share their customisations with others.

It’s one of HA’s strongest features.

You can never have all three.

Arguably, one of Open sources greatest weaknesses is that it often forgets number 4, approachability.

Quite a few potential users struggle to even get the software installed. This may seem a strange concept to you, but when you have a generation that was raised on one click installs from an app store the idea of having to install three other programs before they can even start installing the one that they actually want to use is off putting.

How many people using Tuya even know what Docker or Python are?

seem to be asking for us to hold your hand from the start

Yes, please do.

I’d like a glass of warm milk, and some cookies, too.

Is there a comment tag for "Hi, I’m new here, I don’t know my objects form my entities, but if you’re patient with me I’ll eventually get it, if not, I’ll but whatever Apple is selling that does half of what I want for twice the price.

maybe the new user expects too much from us

Like patience, or understanding?

I just had a simple question, does HA have a built in day\night cycle?

There isn’t really any more to it, or any deeper contextual meaning.

The answer was no.

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And in post 3 i gave you the choice of 2 options to.specify day or night, if that is not helping you enough there is not a lot more that can be done.

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I think that right there proves my “three choices” concept.

it’s easy but not cheap or powerful.

Approachability is in the eye of the beholder. Maybe today’s society has been too dumbed down for our own good. There’s no reason to add to the mediocrity by dumbing down HA as well.

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Yes, and that was very helpful of you. I’m probably going to go with Times of the Day, as I’m operating using arbitrary times rather than sunrise\sunset. I’m still wrangling with some other problems right now so I’ve not quite gotten as far as implementing this yet.

My main issue is that I need to have lower light levels at night, rather than a reactive light level. Hence the binary choice of a day\night cycle.

I’m still getting used to how HA does things, and it’s a little bit of a strugglebecause features that most phone app or set top box based systems simply give you a toggle button for require the installation of multiple components, and then manual configuration after that in HA.

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What we have here is the 80\20 paradox. 80 percent of user only use 20 percent of the features.

As per my earlier comments, my issue isn’t that HA is complicated, or powerful, it’s that the community has “approachability issues”.

When a new user doesn’t understand something, a community’s first response shouldn’t be to criticize them for not asking a more detailed question about a system that they’re clearly unfamiliar with.

I’m here because I would like some help. If you don’t like my question then just walk away.

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There are (of course) multiple options for this part too, rather than tell you them, I will tell you what I do - and then you can decide if that suits.

I have input_number helpers, for my different rooms. I set the value of the input_number helpers based on outside daylight (which you can ignore) - but also when the house is in sleep mode.

Anyway the long and short of it is that I use the value of those input_number helpers as the brightness level of the light in %

 - service: light.turn_on
   target:
     entity_id: light.bathroom
   data:
     brightness_pct: "{{ states('input_number.bathroom_light_brightness')|int(5) }}"

That way the lights come on at the brightness set on the input_number.

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In hindsight, I should just have asked if there was a night mode\sleep mode for HA.

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and again I will say that in the vast majority of times the new user isn’t immediately criticized. They are usually asked clarifying questions. Then if that doesn’t help then we (the free unpaid volunteers) find that it might be too much effort to drag the required info out of them.

your experience may have been different but we have no way to know that since you didn’t post the link to the example.

But just to try to see where you might be coming from I poked around into your other topics you started. I’m only about half way thru but all I can really say is “wow”.

And I believe I found the thread you are referring to.

nickrout is very very far from being an “armchair expert”. I think the issue there was that you had everything so confused that it was hard to parse what you had done and exactly what it was you were trying to do compared to what you had done. you were basically wanting someone to get into your head and understand it from your thought process even though you had only told them things you had done on the other end of that process.

I think the main reason that andrew jones was able to help is that they had seen all of the looooong back and forth (over 60 posts) that nickrout (voluntarily) had with you trying to help you (and who had posted several pieces of code like you asked for above) and they could see where the disconnect was. It has nothing to do with nickrouts competency with HA. Quite the opposite.

I now understand why you said it would be a bad idea to post the link to it.

Lots of people have tried very hard to help you in your many threads and none have initially criticized you right out of the gate for not asking the right question.

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But both those options I gave you are binary solutions, you use them as conditions in your automatons, we have had this whole conversation for what is in reality a post where a sensible solution was given, quickly, politely and with no belittling within a very short period of time. I refer you all back to post 3.

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I don’t understand why you think that I’m unhappy with the solution offered.

It was a good solution.

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Yes, yes please.

That would be perfect.

And I believe I found the thread you are referring to.

I think that the fact that you’re obviously putting more effort into my thread interactions than my technical problems is … unhelpful at best.

It was a different post on a different forum under a different username. Hence why I gave up there and started here.

With all due respect, I’m a new user, I don’t always know the right questions to ask, or the right language to use, and my problems are about 80% that I don’t know how to properly code the things that I want to do - leading me to spend hours trying to figure out if I’m doing something fundamentally wrong that cannot be done in the way that I’m trying to do it, or if I’ve merely gotten a comma in the wrong place. So the best thing that anyone could do for me would be to copy\paste some code out of their own system that does something similar to what I want, and which they know for a fact is correctly coded. If it’s not exactly what I want then I can use it as a foundation for what I do want, but at least I know that it’s functional code.

I’m looking for the simplest and least complicated solutions to build my first system and just get it functioning at a basic level.

Fancy things like variable lighting level are going to need to take a back seat until after I’ve figured out how to simply turn them on and off at the right times.

I have several possible solutions to my original problem, and I’m going to try the simplest one first, and maybe once I’ve gotten the rest of my system functioning at a basic level I will try the more complicated ones.

In the meantime, and I say this with all due respect, could you please concentrate on my original problem (day\night cycle), or if you don’t feel that you have anything to add to it, move on to something else on a different thread with different people.