I am contemplating getting some Nanoleaf panels but I want them not only for the effects and decorations, but some specific status indicators. I was thinking I would like to use them to show individual statuses throughout the home. My office is tucked away in the basement so about 10 hours a day I am disconnected from my family and what is the status is upstairs, unless I look at the dashboard on home assistant. I am contstantly on calls and have two screens full of work stuff, so I don’t look very often (otherwise I get really distracted). I am thinking I would put the Nanoleaf over my desk and 50% of the time I would use it for decoration, but when I am in my office working, I could individual panels represent each member of my family and their home/away status, and then maybe one of them be the garage door, the front door, etc. and when someone rings the front door and I am on a call, the front door panel could flash.
Does anyone know if you can control each panel individually with home assistant? All I can find is documentation saying you can do light.turn_on/off and give it scenes to play through. There are too many permeations to do scenes for every status of my family and home devices.
If you cannot do this with the Nanoleaf, does anyone know any other decorative type panels you can do this with?
I have Nanoleafs Aurora, Elements, Canvas, and Shapes and I’m not aware of a way to do that via HA.
There’s some ugly work you can do with the rest API to do what you’re asking according to the user who asked for separate tile feature request, but there’s nothing easy and native.
On the TPLink KL430’s we’ve duplicated the scripting code that allows you to write the effects however you want and there’s no limit because you’re just scripting what you want. I know there’s a request for the KL430’s to have more of the ‘controlling segments’ which is what you’re looking for in Nanoleaf but last I knew we were waiting on the data dump. This would be easier than what’s currently available with nanoleaf.
Tidbyt is a pixel screen that you can hook up to HA and make it say/do whatever you want. That might be better if you have that many statuses. It would be on your desk.
I’m sorry to hear about not being able to address the panels individually. I was thinking about getting a set specifically for status/notifications because I assumed you could. Glad I saw this thread.
I am already doing what the OP is wanting to do with a LIFX LED strip with zones. I use it for status of my garage lights, washer, dryer, ice maker, and dishwasher. I basically have it attached to a whiteboard and I’ve written above each zone what it represents.
It was a little bit of a chore to set up. On the strip you can’t actually turn each zone on and off. You leave the strip on and set the zone brightness to be 0 for off and whatever for on.
It has some weaknesses. I haven’t been able to figure out how to query the state of an individual zone which would be handy but not critical. For some reason, I have to turn it on and off via HA every 30 minutes or so or the brightness commands don’t work. On/Off always does though. LIFX seems to have some pretty inferior wifi chips in these strips because I’ve experienced disconnects unless it’s really close to an access point. Seems like a common issue on the LIFX forums.
Good luck. My wife and I really enjoy being able to see these statues from a different part of the house.
Two updates on this. I ended up making input_texts for each of the status. When a status changes, I write that in. So for a family member “not_home” I simply wrote an “A”. Then I started creating screens in Nanleaf for the common combos. So the scene may be “HA Status HHAC” (home home away closed). Then I would just callthe scene with light.turn_on and past the scene data:
HA Status {{ states('person.1') }}{{ states('person.2') }}{{ states('person.3') }}{{ states('cover.garage') }}
This worked brilliantly. Until I hit the nanoleaf limit of 50 scenes. The scenes literally took about 10 seconds to make so it wasn’t that bad. But I hit a wall. So now I have changed it up. I just have one scene for each entity and it’s status with just one light. So Scene ‘HA Person1 A’ is one red panel for that person, and ‘HA Person1 H’ is green for that same panel.
When a status changes, I change the input_text for that person, then grab the current scene, and call a script that rolls though each person or entity with a second between them (and have it run twice in case I miss the first time. So basically for 6 entities, it takes about 12 seconds. Then returns to the scene that was playing before the automation occurred.
Best I can do until Nanoleaf opens it up so that you can change one panel without changing the rest.
It’s unfortunate that this isn’t yet possible. I’m trialling both Home Assistant and Openhab. The latter actually does have the functionality to address individual panels. I’m assuming that this means it should in theory be possible in Home Assistant as well. My coding skills are nowhere near good enough to build this though. Perhaps someone smarter can have a crack at it: Nanoleaf - Bindings | openHAB
I just realized a virtually unlimited amount of custom scenes with cololight in HA is possible. Its the knock off version of nanoleaf. I’ve had one for a while and only recently hooked it up to HA. The HA integration is 1000% better than the native app.
I didn’t notice until last night that it has the the ability to build all the custom scenes you want with all the unique animations and colors. And while they’re not individually addressable, there’s so many combinations, it could be a solution.
Now that I know the custom effects functionality was so attainable with kl430 and cololight, wondering truly what the barrier with nanoleaf could be.
Since this does allow to address any panel, it is just not as elegant as an integration. So from the looks of it i would say it is possible but it needs some further work into the current integration.
If any developer out there wants to add this functionality, i would not mind forking out a starter pack for a few tiles. Just a thought.