There will be a Switch entity that will allow you to start/stop a HEV cycle either manually via a dashboard card or via automation/script. I’m not sure what you mean about IR sensor, but you’ll be able to adjust the IR LED brightness of Nightvision bulbs via its own entity which will probably end up being a s percentage slider in the device page.
Here’s what the Device page will look like for a LIFX Clean bulb after the new functionality is added and if you enable all the available sensors. The HEV sensors are automatically enabled, but things like RSSI and the Restart button are not.
That looks good, but yer the slider, or drop-down would be good for the IR, and even a sensor to say the IR is activated would be good.
As of at the moment there is nothing in HA to state the IR is even on.
I’ll double-check with a contact at LIFX, but I’m fairly sure the protocol doesn’t provide any actual runtime information for the IR LEDs, just the option of setting the brightness. Likewise, there’s no way to see the current light level being detected by the lux sensor on each bulb.
The bulb will automatically enable them if it detects darkness when it’s soft powered off (i.e. turned off using software, but still receiving power) because the IR and RGBW LEDs can’t be on at the same time (similar to the HEV LEDs on a Clean bulb).
Not too worried about runtime, rather just whether the IR LEDs are on, as at the moment I’m not seeing that info in HA (Though according to the docs I should).
So just to see whether the IR is on and the level it should be set at.
Sorry, that’s what I meant: there’s no way to tell at runtime whether or not the LEDs are on. The bulbs just don’t provide that information. There is only a single message triplet for IR and that Gets the IR brightness, Sets the IR brightness or States the IR brightness. That’s all we have to work with.
I suppose if IR brightness is 0 can just make a template sensor from that.
This is all you’ll get:
There’s no way to tell if the IR LEDs are actually on or not. The bulb looks like it’s off, but if it’s dark enough, the IR LEDs will be at 100%.
Thats cool, is it a four step slider like the available options?
I wonder how the Lifx app does it then?! They have an icon like the HEV bulbs to say the IR LEDs are on.
It’s a progressive slider that goes from 0% (off) to 100%, but now that I think about it, it’s probably better to implement it the same way as the LIFX app does.
As for the icon, I suspect the LIFX app is cheating. 
Given the fact that IR is invisible, my assumption is that if the brightness value is > 0, the LIFX app just shows them as on if the main LEDs are off. Most likely because they probably are on.
Yer they must just mark as on if the brightness as the app says is below 3%. As the IR LEDs turn on when the bulb brightness is 3% or lower.
Hi, I am very new to home assistant and I currently own two lifx clean bulbs. How do I activate the HEV feature? Any help is greatly appreciated it
There is currently no way to directly activate the HEV mode from Home Assistant. That functionality is still in development.
The first Clean releated PR has been merged: https://github.com/home-assistant/core/pull/77535
This creates a binary sensor that indicates whether a Clean cycle is currently running on the device. As with all binary sensors, you can use it to trigger automations. Note that it only checks every 10 seconds, so it may not be instant, but as Clean cycles generally run for a few hours, this shouldn’t make much difference.
I’m currently working on the second PR: https://github.com/home-assistant/core/pull/77546
This adds a new set_hev_cycle_state service which can be used to start/stop a HEV cycle. The binary sensor updates instantly when the cycle is started/stopped using this service.
Thats awesome, seemed to be missing from the 2022.9 release notes though which is shame.
The 2nd PR, is that going into 2022.10?
All my PRs have been merged so support for both Clean and Nightvision bulbs are in the dev codebase. I’m assuming they’ll be in the next GA release, yes.
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Good news! The new start_hev_cycle service is part of 2022.10, along with support for the Move effect on LIFX Z, Lightstrip and Beam devices (which includes an optimised method for communicating with multizone devices in general).
Currently working on support for firmware effects on Tile and Candle, which incorporates theme support.
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Thanks @Djelibeybi thats awesome, and the move effect is a nice bonus, been using that for a few things, but had to make a cloud get request, yippy for no more!
You’re welcome. I was hoping to get theme support into this release, but I need to move it out to one of the supporting libraries, so that’s WIP. Once that’s done, you’ll be able to splotch a theme onto your multizone device either by selecting one of the default themes from the LIFX app, or by providing your own colors.
Nice, will that apply to strips too, a little like scenes?