I have a fairly simple automation that’s set to trigger at sunset to turn some lights on and then at sensor.sun_next_midnight to turn them off. This is not working reliably as the midnight portion doesn’t always trigger, and I’m looking for help figuring out why:
For example, over the last two days it triggered at
May 22, 2024 at 8:55:07 PM (Sunset, Turned Lights On)
May 23, 2024 at 8:56:04 PM (Sunset, Turned Lights On)
May 24, 2024 at 1:29:33 AM (Midnight, Turned Lights Off)
May 24, 2024 at 8:56:59 PM (Sunset, Turned Lights On)
When it triggers the automation does what it’s supposed to do, but only once in three days did the midnight execution happen.
This is running an RPi4 w/ SSD and it’s very reliable. Not rebooting, etc. It otherwise works just fine, just these Midnight triggers aren’t happening.
Can any of you give me pointers, or tell me what I might be doing wrong?
Here’s the code of the trigger section:
alias: "Interior Lights: On/Off at Sunset and Midnight (if Not Home)"
description: ""
trigger:
- platform: sun
event: sunset
offset: 0
id: lights_on
- platform: time
at: sensor.sun_next_midnight
id: lights_off
condition:
- condition: not
conditions:
- condition: or
conditions:
- condition: zone
entity_id: person.1
zone: zone.home
- condition: zone
entity_id: person.2
zone: zone.home
alias: Persons 1 and 2 are are Not Home
Because AFAIK it only has Sunrise and Sunset events, as per here?
And, probably the simpler answer is because I was looking for something around the middle of the night, but not a fixed time, to turn off the lights. When using the UI to create the automation, ‘Sun next midnight’ appears in the dropdown, so I figured it sane/rational to use.
Sorry, I don’t quite follow. Do you see a problem with my doing it this way?
I do wonder if there’s some sort of timing issue with the sensor getting updated to the new midnight time, stepping back before the current time, resulting in it not triggering. But I’m not (yet) sure how to troubleshoot this?
(I’m also not sure if this is true, but we’re also in springtime here in the US where sunrise is getting earlier and sunset is getting later, and I think this has actual-midnight time changing…)
For the automation, yes. The issue is that it’s not even triggering at Midnight at the problem times. The timestamps I listed out in the main post are all the times when automation was triggered. It should be interleaved sunset/midnight/sunset/midnight/etc, but note the lack of midnights.
The issue seems to be that the automation isn’t even being triggered.
To be specific, this is the time when it worked:
Triggered by the time set in sensor.sun_next_midnight at May 24, 2024 at 1:29:33 AM
Which was… about a day and a half ago from when I’m making this post. It should have happened again about eight hours ago, but was never executed.
Is there some other trace I can look at to see perhaps when sensor.sun_next_midnight is being updated and to what?
The sensor rolls over immediately after the time it shows as its state, so it should be fine using it in a time trigger the way you have. You can look at the entity History to see the times of the state changes.
Thank you. That’s good to know. And downloading the last week-ish of history shows what you say, and the midnight time is getting slightly later so it’s definitely not that.
Do you know if there’s a way to see what happens at each… point… system-wide to see if events are scheduled to fire or whatnot? (I’m sure I have the terminology wrong here, but I’m thinking like… At X time do Y.)
The CPU load on this machine is low (currently saying around 4%) and I really don’t have it doing much other than basic HA stuff with Zigbee/Zwave/WiFi sensors/switches/lights and InfluxDB and Grafana to keep long term history. So I don’t think it’d be missing events because of system load?
Are you having issues with any other time-based automations?
You said this was a RPi 4… How are you running HA?
You could try using a State trigger instead, since the sensors state changes at basically the same time, though you would want to limit the trigger to not fire on unavailable or unknown.
No issues at all. I’ve got only three other timer-based automation. One simply turns two Zwave switches on at dusk and off at dawn, and those have been bang-on reliable for months since I set them up. The other two only trigger if I’m home (lights on 20 minutes before sunset, and on at 6am) and those are reliable as well.
The only other stuff I have is two rarely-triggered motion sensors and maybe a dozen temperature/humidity sensors. All of this is very reliable as well.
Automated backups, to Google Drive, run at 4:23am so not anywhere near the time the midnight automation should.
HA is simply running the official distribution directly on a Pi4B 2GB that has a SanDisk USB SSD connected and which it boots directly from. I keep it as simple as possible to keep troubleshooting/replacement/etc simple. OS is installed to and everything boots and runs from the SSD. There is no microSD card installed.
I like your state trigger idea, I might also try simply setting it for a fixed time about then for the next few days and see what happens.
The automation worked last night. I hadn’t changed anything, it just happened to work this time.
I almost feel like this is going down the path of a bug, but it’ll take a bunch more digging before I can show that… I guess a good, simple test would be an automation that writes to the logbook. I’ll set something up to trigger on midday and midnight to write debug log entries and go from there, I guess.
To build on the last post, I set up two debug automations. It’ll be interesting to see what they gather. Here’s the midnight one, and I’ve also set up a noon one which is effectively the same:
I guess I should note that my other (reliable) scheduled things, since they trigger on dusk and dawn, are using the sun platform whereas the noon/midnight uses the time platform:
So now I’m even more confused… For the last two evenings my debug automation triggered at midnight, but only one of the light automations triggered (the night before last).
Here’s the trigger section for the one that seems to work reliably:
Personally, I’d not rely on using a sensor for a time trigger whose state changes at approximately the same time as the sensor’s value. Given all the stuff that goes on in the core to purposely prevent a slew of triggers firing at exactly the same time, chances are that is preventing the trigger from happening as you would expect. And I wouldn’t even necessarily say this is due to some sort of bug. It’s just you’re depending on this sensor to retain its value until after that time passes, and more than likely, sometimes it’s changing right before that time passes.
FWIW, the corresponding sensor from my Sun2 integration (e.g., sensor.home_sun_solar_midnight) always changes its value at 00:00:00 (+/- a few microseconds, due to the same core “feature” I mentioned above.) Still, as solar midnight changes from day to day, it can go from just before 00:00:00 to just after, or vice versa, and the same thing might happen (i.e., changing right before it would have triggered your automation.)
If you just want something that is “around midnight”, but not the same every day, it might be better to create an input datetime helper and have an automation, say every day around noon, change its value to midnight +/- some random amount of time. Then use that as the input to your automation.
That’s why I suggested your integration! It’s much more reliable than the default one from HA.
To prevent such a race condition, I’m working with the attribute from your sensor for tomorrow. As soon as the sensor changes, I update an input_datetime helper with that value, and use the helper as trigger.
In an essence, I’m setting the time a day before it actually is used. Works great and I can’t say I had any issues with your integration. Yes, I’m a fanboy, and after years of usage I still know why!
EDIT: Btw. I have said it before, but thanks a lot for sun2, I really love it!
I’d really like to go deeper on this, but I’m having a very hard time finding info on how to enable debug-type logging. (But haven’t delved into reading code yet…)
Your sun sensor looks great, but to be honest, I’d really like to see why the issue is occurring before I try something different to solve it. I don’t really need this ‘midnight’ sensor, it just seems useful. Instead I can just do something else like you describe… Some other midnight-ish time. Or just a fixed time.
What (slightly) irks me is the option to use that time is there, but it doesn’t reliably work. So I’d like to understand why, and if it is a bug, file it. Or if it’s just a caveat, maybe help ensure it’s well documented.
I’m not trying to troubleshoot an integration, though… I’m trying to troubleshoot automations not triggering on an integration. So, I think, whatever the internal scheduler is, in conjunction with the timing of the sun integration?
Also, back to my debug automations, it appears those didn’t trigger either over the past couple days. So it seems to be some quirkyness triggering based on the sun_next_noon and sun_next_midnight entities.
EDIT: as a custom repository in HACS… 
