How to turn on lights depending on sensor state?

Third party integrations Node-RED
1

Hi,
within a node-red flow, I’m trying to turn on some lights if the value of a luminance sensor is below a certain threshold.

I used a “call service” node for the lights.turn_on part.
Strangely, the auto completion for domain (“light”) and service (“turn_on”) for this node does not propose “light” as domain value - does anyone have an idea why that might be?
Anyway, I entered the values manually regardless and turning on my light this way works.

So next, I used a “current state” node to get the luminance value from the sensor.
This one has a “halt if” property, but I suppose, I can’t use something like “< 5.0” in there?

To piece things together, I now added a function node between the sensor state and the service call, containing:

if (msg.payload < 5.0) {
    return msg;
}
return null;

Is that the way this is supposed to work? Or am I missing something here?
Piping the message through a function node for a simple comparison seems overly complicated to me.

Sebastian

2

Take a look at the switch node that it can do math and string comparison. You can replace it for your function node in this case.

1 Like
3

Awesome, thanks!
Still requires an extra node to do the “computation”, but it’s much more convenient to set up the switch node.

Sebastian