Funny…I’m the exact opposite. I don’t want it to detect that I’ve entered the room and set the lights to the appropriate scene automatically. Unless it can detect when I don’t want to go into a dark room and be blinded by lights I didn’t want on, I want to control when it turns on. Unless it can determine that I’m only home from work for a few minutes to go to the bathroom, I don’t want it to adjust the heat settings. In other words, until it can actually read my mind, I want to be able to control it and tell it what I want when I actually want it.
I’m looking into an HA setup specifically to get away from Alexa and host everything locally. I may only want simple controls, but I want to truly control everything myself.
You can have it set more intelligently than on/off.
For example, what I have (I’m excessive btw, so this is just one option) is a light sensor that tells me how light it is outside, and then combine that information with sunrise/sunset times.
I use that to set the color of the lighting (circadian lighting style), the light level, and a ramp time to the max brightness I’d want. For rooms where there is good daylight coming in, if the light coming in from daylight is bright enough, the lights lower their brightness (daylight harvesting approach).
This isn’t in every room at the moment, as some of my lights are not RGBW LEDs. Those with regular white LEDs just dim.
Is it perfectly set for your eyes? No, but you can tweak it. My wife likes it bright than me, so I set values that I could tolerate for a nice compromise.
No RGB? Then drop the circadian lighting, keep the rest.
No light sensors? There are some APIs available out there for solar radiation values you can use (openweathermap for example). Less accurate, but probably close enough for what you want.
TL;DR version: add more conditions, and get what you want.
You wake up one day with a bad headache, and bright light hurts your eyes. You can close the curtains, but every room is set to turn the lights on to the brightness that you usually prefer.
How do you manage something like this? Do you have to adjust everything with your phone and reset it when you feel better?
I loved being able to control the dimmer level or color of the lights using voices controls.
I set up a few IFTTT recipes to create lighting and music scenes for things like reading, conversation, movie watching, date night, party time, and a few others and triggered them with a voice command.
It was always a hit with whoever I brought over, but mostly it just did 4 or 5 things with one voice command.
I have no idea how to reliably sense who or how many people are in a room, going by questions here. The presence sensors I’ve tried so far are really inadequate
even if I knew who or how many are in the room, I have no idea if there is any logic to correctly decide whether I want the light on and how much
voice control of lights is more useful to me, although Alexa is slow and I haven’t yet tried other approaches
scheduled lighting has been surprisingly useful. That reminds me, I need to schedule dining room at 20% at 6am m,w,f
Funny…I’m the exact opposite. I don’t want it to detect that I’ve entered the room and set the lights to the appropriate scene automatically. Unless it can detect when I don’t want to go into a dark room and be blinded by lights I didn’t want on, I want to control when it turns on. Unless it can determine that I’m only home from work for a few minutes to go to the bathroom, I don’t want it to adjust the heat settings. In other words, until it can actually read my mind, I want to be able to control it and tell it what I want when I actually want it.
I’m looking into an HA setup specifically to get away from Alexa and host everything locally. I may only want simple controls, but I want to truly control everything myself.
You can have it set more intelligently than on/off.
For example, what I have (I’m excessive btw, so this is just one option) is a light sensor that tells me how light it is outside, and then combine that information with sunrise/sunset times.
I use that to set the color of the lighting (circadian lighting style), the light level, and a ramp time to the max brightness I’d want. For rooms where there is good daylight coming in, if the light coming in from daylight is bright enough, the lights lower their brightness (daylight harvesting approach).
This isn’t in every room at the moment, as some of my lights are not RGBW LEDs. Those with regular white LEDs just dim.
Is it perfectly set for your eyes? No, but you can tweak it. My wife likes it bright than me, so I set values that I could tolerate for a nice compromise.
No RGB? Then drop the circadian lighting, keep the rest.
No light sensors? There are some APIs available out there for solar radiation values you can use (openweathermap for example). Less accurate, but probably close enough for what you want.
TL;DR version: add more conditions, and get what you want.
You wake up one day with a bad headache, and bright light hurts your eyes. You can close the curtains, but every room is set to turn the lights on to the brightness that you usually prefer.
How do you manage something like this? Do you have to adjust everything with your phone and reset it when you feel better?
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I loved being able to control the dimmer level or color of the lights using voices controls.
I set up a few IFTTT recipes to create lighting and music scenes for things like reading, conversation, movie watching, date night, party time, and a few others and triggered them with a voice command.
It was always a hit with whoever I brought over, but mostly it just did 4 or 5 things with one voice command.
Same here.