Hello everyone,
I’m currently trying to brainstorm ideas for how to handle lighting in my home and am looking for ideas. Like most, I’ll be wanting dynamic lighting based upon time of day and motion sensors, however I’m also thinking of seperate lighting modes for example scenes and a party mode. I was thinking maybe a dropdown helper would be the best for this and then doing the lighting in a script tied to an automation?
How do you do your lighting? Do you have different modes like this?
There are several integrations for adaptive lighting in HACS.
Yup but they only cover one type of mode.
I use different lighting states at home, on a per-area basis. There is a “dark” state (lights off), a “background” state (which looks up an area- and time-specific scene and if one is defined, sets that scene, or otherwise defaults to the same as “dark”), and a “task” state where the lights are on and are continuously updated as the target adaptive temperature changes. I have some others, too, like “nightlight” and “chill.”
In my case, I like to rely primarily on hardware devices to trigger state changes (smart switches, motion sensors, contact sensors, etc.), rather than using a UI. So a big challenge is how to drive state transitions in an intuitive way without overcomplicating things.
Yeah it’s tricky not to have one mode of lighting overwriting another, for example if I set a scene (I brought all the hue scenes into HA before taking the hue integration out to have them be zigbee routers), I wouldn’t want motion sensored dynamic lighting to override that.
My idea was to use an event mode which I guess is similar to your task mode with scenes as an activator as one of my house modes, the issue with this however is that that mode covers the entire house, Meanwhile lighting isn’t always applicable to an entire home at the same time. I may still want my dynamic lighting in the bedroom for example whilst a scene is on in the living room.
It gets very complicated very fast. I recently re-wrote a lot of the code to acount for what I’ve learned about the HA platform over the years. You can avoid a lot of messy corner cases by choosing the right architecture for things, but your solution isn’t ever going to be perfectly elegant.
