Hey all. I’m looking for a good light sensor to detect sun light, wifi preferred. It must detect sunlight brightness VS clouds. I’m using this one for now and it works really well except that it doesn’t have a wide field of view. Morning and afternoons don’t get picked up.
Anyone found an out of the box product that has a better field of view? Maybe closer to 150 degrees?
ESPHome DIY?
If so: Outdoor Lux Sensor
And make sure to read the three year update: Outdoor Lux Sensor - #51 by tom_l
You could also use 2 of the ones you’ve got and create a sensor that uses the one with the highest value.
I do this the exact opposite with 2 hue outdoor sensors (one on each side of the house i.e. one is always in the shade) to get a shaded air-temp reading.
Look for a device that has diffuser dome in front of the sensor.
Or you could try how yours behave if you place fresnel lens on top of the original one.
Maybe cut a white ping-pong ball in half and use it as the diffuser dome?
With the diffuser dome in place, the lux readings would be less, yes? Is the difference significant or negligible?
I had this question for the longest time… when shopping for LED bulbs with clear vs frosted glass… because light bulb manufacturers seem to advertise the lumen output to be the same between the 2 versions.
I digress.
Depends on the angle of light. At 0 angle the diffused reading would be slightly less, at high angles more.
For the LED bulb, the total light output is slightly lower if diffused (of course), but light is more uniform. Without diffuser, lumen output highly depends on placement of the meter.
My experience is that lux sensors are really only good for relative readings. I don’t expect anywhere similar on absolute lux values between any two sensors. But they need an initial setup, to see which light level threshold should be used on each one. Fortunately pretty easy to do, by looking at history graph of readings.
