Is anyone else here completely confused at how much hype there is around automated light management systems? I don’t get it. Is it really that hard to turn on and off lights manually that people really need all this stuff? What am I not getting?
1 - outside lights - various lights which light our home's pathway or areas we prefer to have lit at night come on automatically at sundown and turn off at sun-up.
2 - scenes; with HA, we can click one button - a switch with scene control in our case - and have the lights in the room go to a specific set point, receiver come on, select sonos, and tune in to a particular station - an activity which would conventionally require several manual steps with various input devices.
3 - notifications; with HA, I get notifications when the front door or garage doors are opened/closed.
There are several things I plan to implement:
1 - using presence detection and adjusting temps/lights/etc based upon that
2 - fan control; we are heavy users of ceiling fans, and integrating them into home automation would be a significant upgrade. Haven't found a replacement for our Minka controllers which supports zwave (or anything else).
All of this has been possible for years - usually with single vendor solutions which are very costly; HA integrates nearly all automation platforms into a single system allowing each platform's features to work together relatively seamlessly. It's a moving target, but has become very stable/reliable with recent releases.
I finally gave up and now it's just on (or off) 24/7...
I'm considering giving it another try but I'm not to keen on investing in another tech only to see it fail as miserably as first gen z-wave
Is there no good standard that works over electric lines? Seems it could be so much more reliable and cheap. And every single device already has the wires.
Powerline Ethernet is sketchy with some wiring configurations but you'd think that these minimal bandwidths could be handled in nearly all wiring setups.
Is there any standard that isnt mesh based? Hub and spoke with lots of power like wifi seems much smarter.
Seems like complete idiocy to use a fragile low power mesh network for something that a) has to have 99.9999 reliability (like lights) and also has unlimited power (2kW+ available at each node!!) like lights.
The reason I went with zwave was because of the need to work behind an existing switch. For sockets it would have been much easier with 433-plugs.
I think the problem is that the switch itself is too weak in signal, and sits built into the wall. The z-stick doesn't reliably switch it even if I have it inches from the switch.
More importantly, I didn't buy a Kuna for lights on and off with the sun, nor a Nest for presence detection, so I still don't see these functions as killer apps for HA.
One of the "killer apps" for HA is connecting different silo'd smart devices.
A simple sunset/sunrise detector can be had from a cheap photo-resistor. 30 minutes prior to sunset sounds like it needs at least a micro controller with a real time clock and a lookup table with sunset times
Again, I am not trying to flame you, just telling you how I use it and giving you my reason for using the software.
Have a nice day! :-)
Can I control a Hue light bulb with some basic bash scripting and a cron job? Can I do it without calling out to some Internet based web service?
curl --request PUT --data '{"on":true}' http://<local bridge ip address>/api/<your api key>/lights/<light id>/state
One thing I noticed from your command: No authentication. Looks like any software on any device on the LAN can control the light. Is that really true?
To answer your other question, the bridge can be accessible via the online “meethue” portal for things like easy remote access but I think this is optional.
EDIT: oh, and it’ll generate internet traffic for firmware updates I suppose!
You just curl to your hub and everything...works.
Roomba makes sense to me. Sweeping is hard and takes a significant amount of time. Flipping a switch is not hard and takes no time at all.
However, when the light switches aren't well placed it is nice to add a layer of software abstraction between the switch and the light to be able to rearrange existing switches in your home without having to pull new wiring. So you can essentially just keep what you are already doing but make the existing, mature UI even more suited to your needs even if you're skeptical of all of the rest of it.
Light dimming alone is a huge improvement but the ability to start a movie or go to sleep without needing to get up to turn off the light is really great. Believe me I was just as skeptical as many people here.
All the other options I tried before the (admittedly more expensive) hue bulb were either clunky/big or unreliable.
That is exactly what he's doing.
(Seriously, I use a nanoleaf aurora to make a nice sunrise to wake up to, and it also acts as a clock and part of it lights up red if any of my servers are down. I'm pretty excited about open HA.)
How lazy I am once in bed.