Hey everyone! I’m trying to create a “master” lighting schedule in Home Assistant that gradually fades between a few different scenes throughout the day—for example, gently brightening over 90 minutes in the morning, then smoothly transitioning to a mellow evening scene, and finally fading down for bedtime. The goal is a natural-feeling progression without abrupt jumps.
However, I also need certain lights to “exit” the routine temporarily when specific automations or manual adjustments occur. Common scenarios:
- A motion sensor briefly brightens a room light when someone enters.
- Someone manually adjusts a lamp’s brightness.
- Another automation sets a different light state for an event.
When these overrides happen, I don’t want the main fade logic to keep pushing changes onto the overridden light, but I also don’t want the light stuck at the override level forever. Ideally, it should gracefully rejoin the main schedule wherever the overall fade progression is at that time, without snapping back to an old state.
I’ve considered a few strategies:
- Track fade progress with helpers (e.g.,
input_number) so each light can resume from the correct position instead of reverting to an older snapshot. - Use a reference light to figure out the current brightness and color, then match it when an overridden light rejoins.
- Compute brightness/color from the time of day, so any light that “catches up” automatically jumps to the right state.
- Offload to Node-RED or AppDaemon to handle all the fading logic and overrides more programmatically.
- Adaptive Lighting Add-On – although it’s great for natural color temperature changes, I have custom scenes and color profiles that don’t quite match Adaptive Lighting’s sun-based model.
Has anyone tackled a similar “continuous fade + temporary override” challenge? Would love to hear your experiences or best practices, especially around gracefully resuming the fade. Thanks in advance!