Circadian lighting with Home Assistant: Like f.lux, but for your house | Hacker News Reader

Circadian lighting with Home Assistant: Like f.lux, but for your house

tylercipriani.com

534 pointsmodinfo230 comments

I started a company to pursue circadian lighting (called Twist) and sadly pivoted away from it as a core value proposition because of weak reception from the market.

I feel we were 20 years too early (we shut down about 5 years ago).

Our tech enabled smart circadian lighting (we called it adaptive lighting) without configuration, an app, or wifi. The lightbulbs worked without any smart gadgetry necessary.

Every time the switch turned on the light made a 20 ms computation based on the time it stored (via a low power clock and a super cap) and turned to the right brightness and color temperature automatically. This was protected by a patent but also could not find a buyer for the tech despite how differentiated it was

Now I have an entire home with hue downlights + bulbs that does circadian lighting (with HASS as well) and while its not nearly as elegant of a solution as Twist (aforementioned startup), it is pretty great and a huge life changer to me and my fiancè.

Edit: for context we use Philips Hue downlight retrofits + bulbs in other fixtures, all white ambiance, and Lutron Aurora dimmers, connected to HASS on a RBPI, running adaptive lighting from HACS

Have you ever thought about just releasing the patent for everyone to use? Patents stifle innovation iirc.

Not to sound like the infamous Dropbox comment, but would the patent prevent you from doing? Changing light temperature and colour over the course of the day? I've been doing that for years with a cronjob. Doing so without a microcontroller? Those cost pennies nowadays.

> we shut down about 5 years ago

The patent was handed over to our debt financing company (WTI) and sits idle.

The actual patent covered the method for tracking time without power and for synchronizing clocks over a low power mesh network

We've worked on similar circadian products, and I have a similar setup at home. IMO, we're getting closer to the time the market is ready. The main learning is to release MVPs and continue to gather feedback from/build a relationship with the core early adopter market. The market is small, probably in the tens of millions of dollars annually, but the right solution is going to be easy to setup/use with a good UI, and priced at a slight premium over other lighting (but not exorbitantly).

If you ask me I dont think average users will ever pay for a solution to this problem.

People are simply not aware that their blue-heavy LED lights either cause harm to their sleep schedule or simply feel clinical at night.

I live in a very affluent mountain town now, one thats very aware of light pollution and is a general haven for health nuts, and yet 75% of the houses I see with lights on at night have blue-white lights. Especially in their kitchens. This makes sense as they are working areas

Have you noticed the median age of those with white lights? I'd assume it's mostly old people. Personally, I'd stay in the dark before subjecting myself to that sort of unnatural light

> If you ask me I dont think average users will ever pay for a solution to this problem.

I tend to agree. I'm inclined to appreciate the technology, yet at the same time I don't think I like it well enough to blow $60/each to replace all my can lights with Hues. I just run 2700K bulbs for almost every light in the house (excepting the garage & my workshop), and in some areas I make it very bright in lieu of going towards the blue end of the spectrum.

To be clear, I don't think companies should be focused on average users. At least not for a while (until there is sufficient education and agreement that this is a problem, if that ever happens). The market is all about early adopters for the foreseeable future.

In all honesty, I’ve found it healthier to have fixed color temperature in different rooms, and change what room I’m in throughout the day. I’m only in my bedroom when warm lighting makes sense, I’m only in my office when cool lighting makes sense. That helps establish other healthy habits than just sleep, and keeping the bedroom dedicated to sex and sleep is a good practice anyway to combat insomnia.

I do this, but also have different lighting options in certain rooms, like the office.

In my office, the ceiling light is a daylight bulb, but i also have a couple lamps with warmer lights. During the day, I run the ceiling light, and after sunset, turn the ceiling light off and turn the lamps on.

Perhaps a bit Luddite, but less fuss and cost.

That sounds great, but many people (especially those living in cities) don't have that many rooms in their home, so other solutions are needed.

In the past I have put up a curtain around my bed (although originally for other reasons.) Like a homemade canopy bed!

> although originally for other reasons

I dont want to get into too much speculation, but the answer obiviously is building a fort?

> keeping the bedroom dedicated to sex and sleep

Yes. No computer of any sort, the alarm clock's only advanced technology is radio-synchronization and I don't even let a book enter the bedroom - that is for the living-room couch. Does wonder for sanctuarizing the late evening !

So you don't charge your phone in your bedroom?

If they won't even let a book in, the phone is definitely in exile - between eye strain, work emails, and the entire internet, phones are pretty terrible sleep hygiene offenders.

I've heard this often enough that I'd repeat it as general advice, but personally I find that reading on my phone until it's falling out of my hand expedites falling asleep better than anything else, as long as it's not something that compels me to reply / take notes / data flow into the phone (a "two steps back" event). A long-ish article, not doomscrolling.

And definitely use f.lux or equivalent, which is built in these days (at least the phones I've had recently).

Me too. And my phone automatically goes on do-not-disturb prior to bedtime, so no concern of seeing a notification that gets my brain going.

The other nice thing about reading on my phone rather than reading a physical book before bed as I used to do is that I don't need a light. I have the phone brightness turned way down, and obviously use light text on black background. Helps with falling asleep and doesn't disturb my wife if she's going to sleep before me.

I guess some people worry about being unreachable by family in an emergency

That might be a valid corner case, but most folks in this category are simply mildly addicted to screens the kick the usage gives them.

Drug addicts have been vilified for many decades yet most western population falls into some addict category, be it screens, various fetishes, sugary products/chocolate, tobacco products, alcohol, prescription drugs and so on just from legal state-approved sphere.

Just look at average teens these days. Try taking them their gadgets if you want to see some proper hate in their eyes.

I'm shocked that you didn't mention caffeine -- caffeine addiction, in my opinion, is rampant, especially among office workers.

No judgment, either; I struggle without coffee.

I think most modern phones let you select a list of people that will be able to reach you in an emergency.

Mine also has a setting to allow the phone if people call twice within 3 minutes or something.

I used to oversleep but it's completely fixed by leaving my phone in the living room so I must get out of the bed and shut the alarm off.

Did you try punching in your folk wisdom into clinicaltrials.gov?

Here's "blue light sleep":

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?term=blue+light+sleep...

Do you see any affect of blue light on sleep? Or do you see conclusive evidence that blue light does not affect sleep?

This reply comes off as needlessly condescending. If you have a point to make, make it, don't assign homework and ask leading questions.

I was curious where you were coming from, since I thought I had read research on this and my own experience is that changing light temperature is incredibly helpful.

The first one I clicked on showed blue-blocking lenses measurably improve sleep. I don't find the need to confirm more research at this point, given that it clearly helps me.

Blue blocking never helped me but dimming and warming the lights close to bedtime makes me sleep so much better

How did these Twist bulbs account for differences in time zone? If I have some of these lights and I move hundreds of miles to a new time zone, plug the same lights into the new home, how do they lights know?

I wonder how much it would cost to put an gps receiver in every lightbulb? If you can get a gps signal you can get a rough guesstimate of the bulbs location and time and therefore adjust to fit the local circadian rhythm.

Or maybe you could sync to a local radio time station?

both GPS and radio time receivers are very expensive. LED bulbs are a commodity product and thus have little room for margin.

Our low power clock + super cap added $1.25 of BOM which translates to $2.50-$3 of cost to the user.

Led bulbs at Home Depot are $3-5 on the low end.

I would easily pay 30+ USD per bulb if it had time-sync and NO internet connection (LAN optional and not a must-have).

Actually I already did. LIFX day night bulbs cost more than that and don't have the functionality that you had in your product out of the box.

Actually personally I would pay as much as 50 USD per bulb for standalone bulbs that just follow a cycle pre-set by myself over BLE or wifi or even a freaking USB port :p

Maybe they exist but I haven't been able to find them.

$2-3 but GPS antenna is pretty bulky so forget it.

Local radio time is generally iffy if you can't afford bigger antenna. Syncing my watch is basically impossible indoors, althought you might be able to get a bit bigger antenna in a bulb... but they will also be in much worse locations (near walls and inside metal enclosures)

Too much still, also usually no GNSS reception in the usual bulb locations, except maybe for those wooden cardboard houses everywhere in the US (:

Those radio time services over AM/FM better and cheaper for thst.

Yea great question. The bulbs were provisioned via an iOS app and there was a Wifi bulb sold that had a speaker in it (part of our pivot towards more marketable products)

The bulbs could have been updated either by A) having a wifi bulb that then synchronized each other node via a low power mesh network, or B) by opening the app and connecting to the network.

We effectively used the BLE radio to make a mesh network and a BLE device (phone) could connect and send and receive over the mesh.

This is exactly a product idea I had and a product I have been desperate to find and buy. Included the "no cloud connection or hub needed" being a desired feature.

Instead I now have a crappy overly complex setup that involves a bunch of lifx bulbs, a flic hub and buttons and a synology NAS running some python scripts from task scheduler every few minutes to set the desired temperature at certain time ranges (hard coded).

That Twist idea sound(ed) perfect. What a bummer that it didnt work out.

I kinda wish industry would converge on one standard for the devices themselves and compete on "IOT cloud/hub controller" instead of trying to build tiny closed ecosystems around eachother.

MQTT + some schema for typical devices would be a dream. Maybe have some of those devices be able to act as hub themselves with option to connect to "bigger" controller (whether cloud or on premise) but still be able to handle basic functions when say internet is down

That kind of already exists with Home Assistant. Granted, it often feels like a thin wrapper around lots of tiny closed ecosystems, but the fact that most things interoperate well enough means I can recommend it.

Matter/Thread exist as well, and some smart device makers claim to already have adopted it, so we'll see how that all goes.

I used it few years ago and it had problem of occasionally disconnecting from MQ (I was using external one) and just... not reconnecting.

> Matter/Thread exist as well, and some smart device makers claim to already have adopted it, so we'll see how that all goes.

I'm kinda worried it will be the usual bloated standard by comitee result; tho I guess even if that happens it would still be better to have to implement one bloated standard instead of dozen incompatible ones.

Also at least wikipedia page says its "Proprietary, by certification" so eh, I'm worried

You're kind of describing home assistant. It integrates with all the various non interoperable standards and gives them the same interface. (In the ui sense, but also in the sense that you can write scripts that cross manufacturer boundaries.)

I know, but I'd prefer if it came that way from manufacturer instead of hacking at it away.

Like, I converted one of (sadly out of production) mpower pro power strips (it was great, cheap 6 socket with power measurement per socket) to talk to it but it wasn't exactly great experience.

The config of IoT devices should be just "start an app, point it to your (or cloud) controller, done", not "browse compatibility list and hope HASS supports it and the manufacturer won't break that support on update".

Would you mind sharing the patent number? It sounds like an interesting technology to read more about.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US9784417B1/en?oq=9784417

A lot of the claims surrounded how we designed and manufactured a light bulb that was modular.

We could support speakers, cameras, and sensors in the same form factor without any material mechanical or electrical changes.

That sounds like something you want as a feature in bigger system, not something you'd want to buy a specific bulb just for that.

> Every time the switch turned on the light made a 20 ms computation based on the time it stored (via a low power clock and a super cap) and turned to the right brightness and color temperature automatically.

Where it got the time sync from ? You said it didn't need configuration or an app ?

It sounded like it was a real-time-clock chip, powered by the capacitor. So it's self-contained.

I guess it could get it from GPS if each bulb contained a radio but this sounds incredibly inefficient

Right but that cap ain't gonna hold power for few months on the shelf. Supercap self-discharge rate is high enough that it will be down to zero in weeks to months from my experience.

Adding our failed Series A pitch deck because I think its interesting for this crowd:

https://docsend.com/view/bm5za5w

Impressive deck!

Why didn't the raise succeed?

That sounds amazing (insert Fry throwing money meme).

It's too bad it didn't work out. I wonder if there's been any success stories where an idea failed but then later the founder tried again?

I'm guessing usually the first experience burns them out they probably dont bother again.

That's a seriously great deck. Did you do a public post-mortem of why you think you were unable to raise?

No and candidly I mishandled the entire shutdown. As a solo founder, my company going insolvent really put me in a dark place.

I’m happy to talk about it now though.

I think the problem was twofold. We were trying to raise during a tumultuous time for consumer hardware — when VCs were really skeptical of hardware without subscription revenue streams. And our unit economics story was really challenging. COGs grew considerably to get to shipping and that compressed our margins in a way that made the growth story seem capitally intensive. I was convinced we could reduce costs and increase AOV / LTV but VCs really wanted subscriptions

What kind of subscriptions were being considered, if you can still recall?

We didnt consider any, hence the friction towards getting more capital

Was there a reason for not considering it?

I use orange led bulbs in a parallel system to the white lights. Some in lamps plugged into a power strip with a switch.

Simple and cheap, but requires extra lamps.

The cost of a lamp a tunable bulb and a fraction of an rpi is almost certainly lower than the cost of 2 lamps and 2 bulbs.

Two things, I set this up long ago before tunable bulbs were cheap, and the single tunable bulb I checked out subsequently didn't emit just orange, it had some blue.

Oh man, this sounds exactly like what I'm looking for. I find all these smart setups too involved and finnicky. On-off timers are too coarse though. I want slow rising sun.

open the curtains/blinds, when the sun comes up, sunlight gets in.

even if you want to control the time of day this happens, surely you realize that your body evolved according to the sun's timetable, and benefits from that timetable.

if you're not a day shift worker I understand completely.

Um I can open the curtains all I want, there's little sun in German winters out there.

The automatic part is also important since I need it to get up from bed.

In my experience (as someone who has advocated for f.lux and natural lighting since the early days) even when people are directly exposed to the benefits (such as leaving a shift at 11pm and being able to sleep restfully when they get home) it’s still difficult for them to change habits. The work/life autopilot just does not seem to have room for it.

It’s truly heartbreaking, and doubly so when we lose out on companies like Twist.

FWIW, Apple HomeKit + Hue has supported this for a few years (fall 2020?), they call it Adaptive Lighting, and for me this has been a killer app.

It's kind of a bummer that Hue doesn't support it natively, but since I was already in the Homekit ecosystem, it was fine for me.

I've paired this with powerful Sowilo [1] light strips, which have excellent warm/daylight white range and brightness, and it's kept S.A.D. in relative check.

[1] https://sowilodesign.com I'm sure some people can come up with a cheaper solution via AliExpress than Sowilo's, but having a turnkey solution that integrated with Hue was essential for me.

Adaptive Lighting also works with the cheaper Philips Wiz bulbs, provided you use HomeBridge. ( I'm using this plugin for Wiz support: https://github.com/kpsuperplane/homebridge-wiz-lan#readme ) There's probably a Home Assistant plugin too ...

Wiz bulbs will also be getting Matter support within the next year, so we'll be able to add them to HomeKit "natively".

I haven't found anything to suggest that Philips owns or operates the Wiz brand? Where did you find that information? More for my own curiosity than anything.

https://www.wizconnected.com/en-us/about-wiz and https://www.signify.com/en-us

Wiz joined Signify in 2019. Signify is the new name for Philips Lighting (post spin out from Philips).

HomeKit adaptive lighting requires an always-at-home iPad or Apple TV to set it up. Until I have those I find manually setting a large amount of Hue schedules at various times to be OK.

Note that Apple has taken away the ability of the iPad to serve as a Home Hub in the latest iPadOS, and the HomePod or HomePod Mini can also serve as Home Hubs.

Just to be pedantic, the current iPadOS _does_ support it. But there will be an update to the Home software later this year that removes the ability for the iPad to serve as a home hub.

https://www.apple.com/ios/ios-16/

> 14. The new Home architecture is a separate update in the Home app, and will be available in a software update later this year. It requires all Apple devices that access the home to be using the latest software. Sharing control of your home and receiving Home notifications require a home hub. Only Apple TV and HomePod are supported as home hubs.

I've been really confused by this regression of theirs. But I note that the shift will happen at the same time as they introduce Matter support, so perhaps that's related?

That's my suspicion as well! I'm looking forward to seeing what comes of the change.

I've been endlessly enraged that they would not allow a Mac Mini to serve as a Home Hub, while allowing a mobile device that may not be always plugged (and thus may run out of battery or not be home) in to serve as one.

At least it's consistent now.

They probably never wrote any of the software for anything but iOS

First get people hooked to HomeKit automations using their iPad they already had, now take that away and upsell an Apple smart home speaker.

I've been doing it with Hue schedules too for a while. The Hue app does have automations support of rules based on Sunrise and Sunset. It's not quite as smart as HomeKit adaptive lighting because you can not, say, turn off lights during sunrise and expect them to wakeup in your post-sunset mood at the right hour, but if you are automating all lighting with the Hue hub alone and never using switches, it seems to work just fine.

> which have excellent warm/daylight white range and brightness

I must add that full-color lighting has turned out to be a gimmick. But a wide "white" color range (what Hue calls "White Ambiance") has been the real game-changer for me. Sowilo does a great job with its 2200k to 6500k "white" range.

These kind of LED lights are called "CCT" for "Color Calibrated Temperature", if you're searching on AliExpress.

Another happy HomeKit + Hue user. I have all my lights set to adaptive lighting and it's great!

I don't really see an advantage to this over just installing fixed warm color temperature lights in the house. Depends on the building I suppose, but a well designed house should have enough natural light to only use the lights at the time when you would want 'warm.' If you live in at high latitude and need a 'SAD' light for morning and daytime use, that will always be a different light fixture and system, and therefore doesn't require this type of setup either.

Ultimately, regular indoor lights just aren't bright enough to engage the biological response of daylight, regardless of color temperature.

From lookin on amazon, SAD lights seem to be ~10k lux. I have 8*Lifx BR-30 at 1100 Lux each in my kitchen/living room. Seems pretty close.

SAD lights are used at distance of 1-2 ft to get that brightness.

Your bulbs are probably 1100 lumen. Lumen and lux are different. Specifying lux requires specifying the distance or area. 8800 lumen on ceiling would be more like 800 lux at normal distance. Which is a bright room but not sunlight bright which is needed for SAD.

Maybe in California you don't need this, but in the northern half of Europe (i.e. Germany and above) the weather this time of year is pretty abysmal. My office has floor to ceiling glass on three sides, but today at 2pm we had to turn on the lights because it was so cloudy and dark. The 10kWp of solar on my roof produced 2kWh today.

I agree that most indoor lights are not bright enough, but that's mainly because there hasn't been an easy way to regulate them. There's no reason why you can't light your living space to 500 or more lux (most living rooms are barely 150 lux) at 6500k and regulate it down at night, and something like this makes it easy to do.

When I was living in Germany I felt like I was an astronaut in December because it never got very bright during the day and the nights seemed to last forever. My biological clock quickly got unstuck and started running free.

wait till you experience Norway of Finland, its a serious issue up there

My office looks like candlelit… on dark days you get so sleepy.

I found I need about 20k lux for much of the day to not feel sleepy or depressed in the daytime. I had to move to California and work outdoors to overcome this, I used to live far north, but even "extremely bright" indoor lights weren't enough to have a positive effect on me.

Do you mean lumen?

I've never heard of lighting a space more than 500-1000 lux unless extreme fine detail work is being done. At 20k lux would you even be able to see what's on your computer screen?

I did mean lux, and what you are saying is exactly my point. I can't easily light indoor areas that bright, so I need to be outside. There are a few people online that have experimented with indoor lighting that bright for seasonal depression, but it's expensive to do.

You do realize Northern Europeans are adapted to needing less sunlight? I would emulate candles if I were you. Which means warm color temperatures. So you don't need the product of this thread, you just need a simple warm color temperature bulb. Do some extra research and get one that doesn't flicker.

> You do realize Northern Europeans are adapted to needing less sunlight?

... Do you think people don't travel, or that we only have Northern Europeans living here in Europe?

I think that your assertion about high color temperature being important is less strong than you thought it was.

Northern European here. No... No, we are not. We suffer from pretty extreme depression during the dark months which has been largely ignored until recently.

Some people get it bad (like me) some people get it mildly. For some reason I can't find figures right now but I recall it being something like 10% of people living in northern Europe get SAD seriously and up to 30% more mildly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_affective_disorder

Depends on where you live. Where I'm at it gets dark at 4:30PM in the winter.

I dunno.

I spend time in the evening working on art projects where the color rendition of LED-based "warm" bulbs is awful (can't tell the difference between the coated and uncoated sides of inkjet paper), although there are some halogen-based "warm" bulbs that are a lot better.

Most of the lights in my house are set to "warm" but I do use "cool" when I need to make fine sensory distinctions and I have a work area with a few of those halogen-based bulbs that I turn on as needed.

https://www.solux.net/cgi-bin/tlistore/colorviewbulbs.html

Nothing's going to beat incandescent/halogen for color rendition :)

That said we did have pretty good results with the (IIRC) Philips high CRI fluorescent tubes. Working at the photo lab it was a trip taking a print from the back (good lights) to the reception area (regular commercial lights) to the outside and seeing the colors on the print shift.

>a well designed house

What fraction of houses do you think qualify? Hence what proportion might benefit from technology?

> In the evenings, after the sun sets, the lights dim, and it gets harder to read and work on projects—that’s a feature. It’s a signal that it’s time for bed.

Here in Boston the sun will set at 4:30 today, but that's way too early to be starting to send my body "time to go to bed" signals.

Yep. Same. I got so angry reading that utterly dumb quoted statement that I finally found the motivation to sit down and write a PR to fix that issue.

Starting with adaptive_lighting 1.2.0, it is possible to specify a max_sunrise_time and/or min_sunset_time that ensures that the virtual sun always rises at at most a specific time and sets at at least another specific time.

Basically, you can pin your virtual day to have at least e.g. 12 hours of daylight with optionally even more based on the real sun.

This reminded me of the video by DIY Perks building an "artificial sunlight" for their office: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw

The amount of effort is unbelievable, but I'd love to have something like this at home. I can only imagine the impact on my productivity during winter evenings…

I was at a party this weekend at a co-op where many of the rooms had no windows. I'm sure something like that would be well-appreciated.

A few years back there was a philanthropist who wanted to donate housing to a university, but one of his stipulations was that everyone got their own room, and that the rooms that didn't get natural light would be outfitted with an artificial window like this.

Did you know that the actual, original, F.lux works with Philips Hue!

https://justgetflux.com/lighting/

This should have always been a feature of the Hue bulbs. Might have been able to justify the cost, but now they're just 4x the cost of competitors that don't need a hub.

It is a feature of the Hue bulbs being worked upon, see: https://hueblog.com/2022/07/16/natural-light-new-function-no...

Which ones that don't need a hub can you recommend? I'd like to have a sunrise simulation in my bedroom, so I only need one lamp like this, and the Hue system seems to complicated for that use case.

Ideally it should be a strong lamp. Like a 100W equivalent LED bulb.

Kinda. I never managed to get it to work.

I then tried it with home assistant a few years ago, until I finally stopped using both f.lux and leaving my lights on yellow anyway ;)

Done this for the past 6 years running a combo of cheap zwave color temp adjusting lights, smart things, and a smart things app automation called circadian daylight.

Guide/Forum: https://community.smartthings.com/t/circadian-daylight-smart...

Makes the evenings more laid back and I'm able to sleep a bit easier. Well worth the effort to get it setup.

What kind of bulbs are you using? Most of the z-wave ones I found do not have great CRI and the cheap ones generally don't support white color temperature at all (falling back on some RGB).

I have recessed lighting in my home with non-serviceable LEDs.

I would love to find a replacement that supports multiple color temperatures.

Suggestions solicited!

My house has recessed LEDs throughout with hardware switches to control the colour temperature between five options. My approach has been to set colour temperature based on room (warmer in living rooms, basement, cooler in kitchen, etc.). I then use separate lamps or light fixtures to fill in where I want different colour temperatures. (Bedrooms and offices have ceiling fans with warm lights as well as some hue lights with colour temp that changes based on time, kitchen and dining room have warmer pendant lights / chandelier, etc.)

Some manufacturers make dumb bulbs that dim-to-warm, which are very nice for some applications. (Dim-to-warm recessed LEDs exist, but they weren’t optimal for my application.)

I just replaced everything with high-hats.

The decision was made easier when the living room ceiling collapsed on me.

Looks like I was mistaken. We've replaced all the zwave bulbs with Sylvania Osram zigbee-based ones in our new place. Cheapo stuff, but they don't flicker when adjusting temperatures/brightness:

https://www.amazon.com/73742-SYLVANIA-Adjustable-SmartThings...

Smart things has been a bit of a mess lately with their automation related to zigbee. They've got a hotfix rolling out, but it's been a month or two of random lights turning on or refusing to turn off.

F.lux has always bothered me, because despite their very large volume of supporting papers[0], what I've never seen is a consistent link between the "blue light" from those many studies directly back to my real computer/tablet/phone screen.

I wish there were more studies done with computer monitors, rather than light boxes directly.

[0] https://justgetflux.com/research.html

I haven't looked at their list of papers but if they have evidence that blue light affects sleep, why would reducing the blue light coming off your phone/monitor NOT affect sleep? I don't really see why the source of the light would be important to the results.

There is conclusive evidence that blue light does not affect sleep in any way as large as people expect. We're talking about 1 minute on average change in sleep duration.

Here is a simple search on real trials:

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?term=blue+light+sleep...

In my opinion:

The f.lux guy is intellectually dishonest. He's been at it long enough. He's got a lot of axes to grind. I don't see any trials in https://justgetflux.com/research.html.

f.lux use by normal people and other similar stuff is a good canary for how sophisticated a person is.

Many, many adults suffer from going to bed too early, not too late, especially older adults, a huge number, millions. People have been trying blue light as an intervention for them, and it doesn't work.

>f.lux use by normal people and other similar stuff is a good canary for how sophisticated a person is.

What do you mean by this?

Personally I find warmer colours easier on the eyes, especially in dark rooms. Nothing to do with sleep.

> There is conclusive evidence that blue light does not affect sleep in any way as large as people expect. We're talking about 1 minute on average change in sleep duration.

Sleep duration and sleep quality are different. Blue light definitely affects sleep quality, as your own link shows multiple studies that found this result. The causal association of blue light and sleep quality is pretty solid.

> Blue light definitely affects sleep quality, as your own link shows multiple studies that found this result

I want to live in a world where more people understand that 100 studies finding something still doesn't make it true...

Can you tell the difference between a screen that's off and a screen that's on but just "black"? That's the difference. I don't know precisely what that is/does, but I think a lack of evidence with actual monitors/devices is an interesting omission.

not if we talk about OLED

While I haven’t gotten my lights set up like this, I do use home assistant, just like the author and it is simply amazing. For things like this, the setup can get quite complex, but the main benefit is that it provides a unified interface to any connected device in your home.

My main use case is energy tracking: it does a marvelous job collecting and graphing data across a bunch of different sources: from the solar panels from one vendor, the semi proprietary smart meter protocol my electricity company has, weather data etc. Having all that data together in 1 place is an invaluable tool to make any investment decisions on energy improvements to our house.

How/what are you using to monitor your smart meter?

Not OP, but in my jurisdiction the smart power meters broadcast consumption as SCM at 900MHz. rtlamr

https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr

does a good job of receiving and decoding those broadcasts using a cheap SDR. My local water utility also broadcasts consumption as SCM+, also 900MHz. I'm able to grab both with the single SDR.

Thanks for this. I have a bunch of SDR dongles. I am going to mess with it when I get home.

It’s always meter specific, I use the plugin and dongle as described here: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/dsmr/ this works with a bunch but by far not all of the meter types in EU.

Add Node-Red to that and building automations is a breeze. And with a stick such as Conbee 2 you can control all the lights and non-light ZigBee products directly from Home Assistant.

And you do not have to firewall the bridge from calling home once a minute.

Is there any evidence F.lux and similar actually do anything other than make pretty lights? I mean, that's fine enough if that's what you want but I often hear health or sleep claims made. Are those substantiated in any way?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23527...

tl;dr - for the core phone/laptop F.lux use case, no, it isn't substantiated

What do you mean? That article says the claim is false. LCD monitors emit blue light whether you want it or not anyway. Merely setting something in the OS to change the color temperature does not eliminate blue light and I don't think it even necessary changes the color temperature.

Yes, blue light exposure worsens sleep quality:

https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-ha...

We kind of even know why, because of blue light receptors in our eyes linked to hormones released in the morning to increase alertness. This is linked to the light spectrum seen at sunrise.

If you're interested in HomeAssistant to solve this problem, I wrote a simpler implementation, [1] of using the sunrise/sun position sensor to change scenes for a room's lights. This didn't involve having a Zigbee hub like this post suggests, mostly because all my lights were Hue, or Zigbee-compatible (IKEA-branded Tradfri lights) that were already on my Hue bridge.

I found this worked for me, since I only needed to create four automations:

- What happens if the lights are turned on after/before sunset (2)

- What happens if if the lights are already on after/before sunset when it changes (2)

This implementation seems more around more fine adjustments to brightness/colour/colour temp, but mine's more geared towards "Is the sun down? Change the scene."

[1] https://mattdemers.com/sun-specific-light-automations-with-h...

I have an even simpler setup. I have Hue lights and Ikea on/off smart toggle switches. The simple 1/0 ones, not the large 5-button ones. I created a simple setup where tapping the top "on" part will toggle between "bright" and "off", and tapping the bottom "off" part will toggle between "low red light" and "off".

I use it in all my bedrooms, the living room, bathroom and toilets. At the end of the evening I just switch to red light and wind down for bed. At night I use the red light everywhere. I have a newborn and it's fantastic to be able to change him or take him downstairs for a bottle without bright light waking him too much.

I wish something like this existed for TVs. Since I got my eyesight procedure 10+ years ago, I soon noticed I was quite sensitive to lights that didn't affect me at all (maybe my vision was too bad to even notice, don't know). That extreme sensitivity faded off in the first six months, but I still get annoyed by some lights and the first thing I do with a new PC/Phone is setting up Redshift[1] or Twilight[2], and although I'm not a big TV consumer, the times I do watch it, I wonder if there's a market for this kind of features.

1: https://github.com/jonls/redshift

2: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid...

There are apps on Android TVs (as well as Android phones) that are available on Google Play Store that do this.

Some years ago when I lived in the north, I built probably the shoddiest circadian lighting that exists (and still operates).

It is an ESP board with some MOSFETS soldered on a perf board, connected to a huge RGBW LED strip and powered by a beefy power supply I found. 230V cables barely covered and the perf board naked to the elements.

The ESP hosts a page that displays sliders to control the light, which send a websocket command to change the PWM duty cycle. I implemented a lamp temperature to RGB that I found on God knows where, and then had a python script on a raspberry pi to slowly raise brightness and color temperature for sunrise etc by sending directly the websocket commands.

It is a single C++ arduino file with all the html and Javascript as big char arrays. It is horrendous. But hey, been running for years and I know I will never touch the code again anyway :)

I use incandescent and halogen everywhere and don't have a problem with color temperature. Also, the CRI of my bulbs is incredible.

My house has maybe 20 light bulbs in it, most of them under 75 watts, except for a couple of strategic halogen fixtures.

Sometimes I think about getting LED smart lighting, but then I think about how many iterations of setups I would have to go through it get everything dialed in, all the e-waste I would be contributing to, all the plastic, all the security vulnerabilities, all the software updates, all the glitches, all the flicker from cheap PWD circuitry and I decide to stick with simple glass and red hot metal.

> I use incandescent and halogen everywhere and don't have a problem with color temperature.

Well, you might not have a problem, but some people like colour temperatures >3000K.

> Sometimes I think about getting LED smart lighting, but then I think about how many iterations of setups I would have to go through it get everything dialed in, all the e-waste I would be contributing to, all the plastic, all the security vulnerabilities, all the software updates, all the glitches, all the flicker from cheap PWD circuitry and I decide to stick with simple glass and red hot metal.

I’ve found a lot of that hassle is mitigated by getting high-end dumb LED bulbs, paired with reliable smart switches (only where specifically required for automation purposes) from a traditional lighting manufacturer with long support periods. (Lutron.)

On top of that, even the "warm" color temperature LEDs put out a pretty good spike of blue light. I'm working on some analysis of this, and even the "warm glow" sort... yeah, there's a ton of blue. Right in the realm of spectrum that convinces our body it's day.

So I'm not sure that the whole color shifting makes a big difference if you don't get rid of the blue as well. White LEDs are generally blue LEDs with phosphor coatings, but they still leak the blue. It's quite annoying.

I've been going back to incandescents and they're properly nice in the evenings.

> On top of that, even the "warm" color temperature LEDs put out a pretty good spike of blue light.

That's what I figured. LCD monitors are all painful for me to look at as well.

I find most "2700K" LEDs sub-optimal. Helped someone set up their office recently. It was too dark with 1 bulb in each of the 3-bulb ceiling fixtures (48" fluorescents). We found 48" 4000K LEDs in the ceiling fixtures. She found 3000K tubes (GE? Feit? Philips) at the home store. They're quite pleasant, much better than other 3000K bulbs I've been around.

I have some Citizen "CITILED Amber Color COB" on top of my kitchen cabinets. They have a little hump in the blue portion of their spectral graph, but are fantastic. Rated at 2200K

https://ce.citizen.co.jp/cms/ce/lighting_led/dl_data/COB_Amb...

Also have some Amber Philips 2000K bulbs, which are quite nice.

Ha, I've been doing this manually for years. I found smart lights that could get as low as 1850k and then put them in key areas in the house. After the kids go to bed, I try to limit all lighting to 1850K (as well as using that color temp on all screens that I use at night).

Of course I'm just one person so it's all anecdotal, but it definitely has helped my sleep in a noticeable way since I did it.

Cutting total light down a lot helps, too. The 60-75 watt (incandescent or equivalent) standard for lights—often with several such bulbs active per room, even—is way brighter than needed. Dropping room light to only enough to navigate the room safely, and using slightly-brighter (but still nowhere near 60 watt) lamps, either hand-portable or in particular locations, makes a huge difference, and you can still do almost anything in that kind of lighting.

Once you get used to much lower lighting at night, ordinary whole-room lighting seems insane. Why try to make it as bright as day at night? You can read, play board and card games, play music, even draw or something like that, with a small faction as much light as the typical house puts out when you flip the light switch in a room. And it has big effects on sleepiness (if you don't ruin it by staring at a hyper-stimulating glowing rectangle—color temp may help a little, but Internet-connected screens are sleep poison)

I've been doing this for years with Lifx bulbs: https://github.com/adamjacobmuller/lifx/

Works really well. Lifx bulbs have excellent CRI (proper color temperature adjustments, not just fumbling with RGB) the only downside being they are not cheap. Worth it IMO though.

Apple's supported this for a while via HomeKit Adaptive Lighting as well. It's great that it's becoming more ubiquitous!

Yeah, that was released with iOS 14 in September 2020. There's very little official information or documentation I can find on it, but it's mentioned here:

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/control-accessories-i...

I wish I could adjust the curve though. It's still too white in the evenings for me.

This is part of why I wrote my own software to do this. Lifx kinda had the feature implemented (I do no like how theirs works) but also the curve was not great. Too dim in daytime, too bright at 2am.

I'm seeing 80 CRI on their website, which isn't great.

For curious buyers, this is already more or less built in:

- Philips Hue + Hue Hub : the default Hue app can do this, leveraging Hue Labs "Feel better with light" that runs from the hub so you don't need a laptop or other device after the formula is installed.

- Apple HomeKit Adaptive Lighting + Hue or Eve -- I'm a big fan of Eve light strips. See more accessories here: https://www.imore.com/best-accessories-with-homekit-adaptive...

Beyond those, there are other options w/o getting too tricky:

- Hue + Hue Automations + LivingScenes (or similar) + shift at sundown/sunrise

- Hue Labs (various other options)

- Third party apps like HueDynamics, and f.lux itself

- IFTTT: https://ifttt.com/connect/weather/hue

For what it's worth, the Philips Hue white bulbs that vary the white temperature are great, with a better fuller white than the full color bulbs.

Adaptive Lighting is also a good option for Home Assistant: https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting

I've automated all the lights in my house using Zigbee switch / dimmer modules behind the light switches on the wall. This was a very affordable option, but unfortunately I can't change the color. I can only turn lights on and off or change the brightness. I'll have to think about getting some ceiling lights with adjustable color temperature whenever I move to a new house.

One thing I really like about my current system is that it still works without any internet or network connection, or if my Home Assistant server is offline. The light switches just function normally. I think this would be a bit more complicated with controllable ceiling lights, but it could probably be done via Zigbee binding and a Zigbee wall switch.

I'm doing this with HomeKit, Homebridge and Nanoleaf A19 bulbs.

It's cool having my basement office lighting switch to evening mode (they dim slightly), have the color temp adjust, all at the same time my Mac switches from light mode to dark mode.

HomeKit is pretty powerful if you're willing to bolster it with Homebridge and use an alternate app for configuring it (I use Controller for HomeKit).

For example: I have an automation that opens/closes my garage door as I arrive/depart as long as my phone is in CarPlay mode. Yes, I could push the button on my rear view mirror, but it's one less thing to do. Glueing this together required a Personal Automation that updates a Homebridge dummy switch which tracks my phone's CarPlay status. Then I could make a HomeKit automation which triggers on my phone's location but only when the switch that track its CarPlay status is on.

That said, as a developer, I do sometimes wonder why I'm not just using Home Assistant.

How do you know if it should open or close the garage? Does it open when you start the car? How quickly does it open the garage when you get home?

I’d be very interested to see the actual code of this as I’d like something similar. That said, CarPlay gives me a button to open/close the garage (which I have linked via Homebridge to my garage door opener, works 70% of the time). I just wish it was better tied to the alarm system.

> How do you know if it should open or close the garage?

I just have the automation to open when I arrive home and to close when I leave home. Arrive and leave are built-in HomeKit triggers for automations.

> Does it open when you start the car?

Nope, for that I press the button on the wall inside my garage as I'm walking to my car. I want the garage door open before I start the car.

> How quickly does it open the garage when you get home?

Based on using "when I arrive home" the door opens when I'm about 30 seconds away, maybe 500 yards? HomeKit also has location based triggers where you can draw the circle different sizes. I just used the canned "arrive home" and "leave home" triggers.

> That said, CarPlay gives me a button to open/close the garage (which I have linked via Homebridge to my garage door opener, works 70% of the time).

The point of this was to avoid interaction, otherwise I'd use the button on my rear-view mirror which on my Mazda is more accessible than the CarPlay button on the Mazda display.

> I’d be very interested to see the actual code of this

I've got a pair of dummy switches in Homebridge:

1. "Phone CarPlay Status"

2. "Garage Door Trigger"

I have two personal automations (via the Shortcuts app) on my iPhone:

1. When CarPlay connects -> Set "Phone CarPlay Status" to On

2. When CarPlay disconnects -> Set "Phone CarPlay Status" to Off.

I have the following HomeKit automations:

1. When I Arrive Home and Phone CarPlay Status is On, set Garage Door Trigger to On.

2. When I Leave Home and Phone CarPlay Status is On, set Garage Door Trigger to Off.

3. When Garage Door Trigger Turns On set Garage Door Target Door State Open

4. When Garage Door Trigger Turns Off set Garage Door Target Door State Closed.

The last two automations (3) and (4) are needed because a door is a secure accessory and those require confirmation if added directly to an automation. But if you trigger them via a dummy switch, you can avoid the confirmation.

I used the Meross Garage Door Opener to make my 2004 Wayne Dalton openers HomeKit aware. I'm running a pair of garage doors off of it actually.

I'm currently looking to retrofit my place with variable color temperature lights. In industry parlance, it's is called "Tunable White". On one hand, non-hobbyist industry has a ton of great hardware options. High CRI, high R9, guaranteed lack of white point drift, 0.1%-100% dimming (although 85 CRI and 10-100% is most of what you'd typically find at Home Depot), etc.

My issue is that there are several competing control standards (with 0-10V being the more common but primitive one for America), and plenty of them (like PoE Ethernet lighting - super cool IMHO) are very much commercial-only. And stuff like Lutron's RadioRA is quite proprietary, with not much interoperability.

On the other hand, going with Phillips Hue or similar will lock me into that ecosystem - which also dictates which lights and switches I could use.

> On the other hand, going with Phillips Hue or similar will lock me into that ecosystem - which also dictates which lights and switches I could use.

Good news, there's no lock in with Hue. I have about 20 of those bulbs around my house and they all work great with the generic Zigbee coordinator attached to my Home Assistant box. I don't use the Hue Hub, nor do I use the app.

Alongside those bulbs I have another 15-ish Sengled bulbs that also speak Zigbee. They're cheaper and similar in quality, but the color temps don't get as low as Hue. (2700K vs. 2200K on the Hue)

Only caveat with the Hue bulbs is that if you need to reset them for any reason, you'll need either a Hue Hub or one of their dimmers to do that. So I guess there's a little lock-in on that front, but it's not an ecosystem thing where you're stuck.

To avoid vendor lockin you can run an install of Home Assistant with a Deconz zigbee USB dongle, which can then act as a hub for a massive range of zigbee devices. including Phillips hue, but I use Ikea’s Tradfri bulbs at a third of the price.

Philips Hue operates over Zigbee so there isn't vendor lock in. Like you, I've also had exposure to the high end industrial LED emitters, but using those at home is hard. I ended up going with Ikea TRADFRI bulbs, they are much cheaper than Hue (USD 9-13 each) and don't seem to be any worse than the Hue bulbs. Ikea also sells Tradfri buttons (switches to control the bulbs) and motion sensors. And not relevant for this, but also Tradfri controllable power outlets.

I'm using a Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 dongle (available on ebay for $20, uses a TI Zigbee chip) plugged into a small single board computer server. Zigbee2MQTT is FOSS software which interfaces with the Zigbee dongle and manages the Zigbee network. You can pair devices to the network with with its web GUI. Zigbee2MQTT allows you to control the devices over MQTT, a lightweight messaging protocol. I wrote a Python script for this. It connects to MQTT and listens for messages from the buttons (on, off, brightness up/down, CCT up/down). When it gets a message from a button or motion sensor, the script sends a MQTT command to the relevant bulb / group of bulbs.

My setup is all Ikea Tradfri, but I could very easily add in Hue bulbs or other Zigbee devices such as ones from Aqara or Sonoff. I just purchased a Zigbee thermostat but haven't gotten around to setting it up yet. The whole thing works without internet access. Though you could expose the MQTT server to the internet and set up a method to control your devices when away from home.

The main risk is that the industry moves past Zigbee. It's already moving to Thread & Matter, but I've only done a bit of research into that. I think Zigbee will be supported and products will continue to be available for a while. Or a self-hosted Thread software might also end up existing.

The tradfri bulbs don't dim to 0.1% but they get pretty dim. And your control software could do things like selectively turn off certain bulbs in a room as you command it to lower brightnesses. The CCT range is good enough for me. The Tradfri bulbs are specified as >90 CRI. They don't flicker.

> non-hobbyist industry has a ton of great hardware options

What options are you looking at? I will probably be looking into some of these soon.

Lighting was the first and still most meaningful smarthome thing I've done, though I did it much more manually. Hue bulbs don't require any sort of WAN link, the hub(s) will work fine purely via LAN (though without firmware updates sadly without opening a hole), and of course one can then remote in with a VPN (via a bounce/mesh if you don't have a fixed IP) like anything else LAN-based. And 3rd party apps can seamlessly deal with multiple hubs. This is a fun read because I've been considering moving to Home Assistant, primarily because I'm worried about what happens when the hubs inevitably fail. 10+ years after its launch Philips has still never bothered to implement and backup/restore functionality(!!!), so that's a real driver. But in terms of pure functionality it's worked very well to code up a bunch of manual timers and time-of-day-based options on switches.

And in terms of QoL impact it's been a pretty big deal for us. For context I live near the Canadian border, so not Alaska-level in terms of differences in night/day over the course of a year but far enough north that it does vary quite a lot. Being able to have a whole "sunrise" scene for the house, to have "daylight" with varying use of color and brightness (I've added 2 or 3 way bulb systems to a bunch of lamps to deal with Hue color bulbs not having as much brightness range as would be ideal), and warmth at night has made it so much easier to maintain proper sleep cycles. Rather then an audible alarm, I have a 15-minute animation of "sunrise" I put together that gently wakes me up and by the time it's getting to the whiter/bluer portion I'm set, I head down without any grogginess even when it's still black out. This all works for motion sensors too, and I've been able to massively cut down blue light emission and emission period of outdoor light at night without compromising safety and that I think is quite important for wildlife. There has been research on rampant blue light (and artificial light in general) affecting insect populations, which are under pressure anyway.

I think Smart Home kit is powerful and can be (and certainly has been) misused. I will not touch anything with any sort of internet requirement, I segment things onto their own VLANs, and I'd be more cautious about it for things without the same visible indicators or with more potential side effects. But it has a real place too, and lighting is a perfect use case. I hope efforts like Matter pan out, the real issue is how vertically tied a lot of stacks are.

If you would like to achieve this based on simple dimming, or even better, by using smart switches instead of smart bulbs, take a look at NASA spinoff Bios Lighting.

Here's their A19 (normal bulb) specsheet: https://bioslighting.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/BIOS_A19...

There is also a spotlight-style BR30: https://bioslighting.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/BIOS_BR-...

I would like to recommend Adaptive Lighting in favor of Circadian Lighting. It has the added benefit of being able to detect if someone manually adjusts the brightness or color, and then stops the automatic adjustment for that light.

https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting

This is a big part of what I like about sleeping in the bush. You suddenly rediscover what it means to be embedded in natural cycles: feeling fresh in the morning, sleepy in the evening, lethargic on a rainy day, hungry 3-4 times a day, etc. It's incredible how quickly it comes back, and how good our modern infrastructure is at deregulating it.

I tried the 'Circadian lighting component' before on my Home Assistant setup. However, the component made my lose control over certain devices (even though I configured it that I should be able to override the temp/brightness settings). It either kept lights off when I turned them manually on, or visa versa. So now I just reverted back to 'Automations' per room that are triggered by motion sensors and activate one of the predefined scenes. Each room has aprox 3 scenes: day, after sunset, and night. The automation trigger the scenes based on predefined times. I agree with the author that it's really great to not get blinded by bathroom lights in the middle of the night. The automated motion activated scenes per room/ time also give a very luxurious effect when e.g. entering the living room in the evening and it automatically toggles a cozy dimmed light scene.

There are light bulbs that will automatically decrease light temperature when they are dimmed (e.g. Phillips with "Warm Glow"). There is no use case for either warm bright or cold dim light.

Made the installation much simpler for me, because you can use standard dimmers without an extra communication path for CCT.

I recently added a similar feature to the absolutely terrible code I've hacked together for controlling my smart lights[0]. I used python's astral package to get the highest and lowest sun elevations for the day, then define the lights' warmth at both, and at elevation == 0. Every 15 min a cron job sets the lights' warmth accordingly.

This is for a room with very little natural light, where the lights are on most of the day. Having them respond to the position of the sun lets me still feel the rhythm of the day outside.

[0]: https://git.sr.ht/~h4n1/z2m-scripts

I am testing atm theory that cycling environment color temperature from cold to warm and back to cold in 90 seconds boost your performance in monotonic work by at least 15%. There is some old publication somewhere accoring to my sources, but I could not find it.

Excellent.

I wish that Hue and LIFX would also make a physical adjustment switch/knob for color temperature.

I wished this too, and got close enough by buying the Hue remote switches:

https://www.philips-hue.com/en-us/p/hue-dimmer-switch--lates...

It turns out there are really only 3-4 different temperatures I use normally, and this allows you to switch between them. I also use the Hue timers so I frankly don't need to use this that often, but it's nice to be able to switch between both scenes and brightness levels without pulling out my phone (edit: and more importantly so people who aren't me can control the lights if they need).

It's not a perfect solution: there are still some annoyances with people forgetting to leave the main switch on and only use the mounted remote, but overall I am very happy with this system.

>It's not a perfect solution: there are still some annoyances with people forgetting to leave the main switch on

I use light switch covers. They just screw on over the switch, and have one side open so you can manually manipulate it if you want, but it prevents accidental state changes.

How about a pair of goggles with a filter that can dynamically adjust the amount and color of light that gets through to your eyes. So, no matter what the environment you're in, your eye always get the right light at the right time?

Relevant article from The Onion:

https://www.theonion.com/woman-who-drinks-6-cups-of-coffee-p...

I can't work out how this could actually work (if your smart color changing lights are just paired with regular switches).

1. It's midday, your lights are bright and blue 2. You turn the switch off. The bulb (and ESP) no longer has power. 3. It's 9pm; you turn the light on.

Would you not get bright blue light for a second or two until it had a chance to sync? You can get timely local execution with something like Tasmota but it has no consistent internal clock, so you're at least one network hop away from it taking proper state.

The problem with solutions like this is that color rendering index of RGB LEDs is abysmal to the point that I can't really stand it. I ended up just using 2300K high CRI bulbs throughout.

I'm thinking of using regular bulbs with smart switches, and dim them, and then add a bit of red light from a color-led strip.

I think that would have the same effect, without needing those specialized bulbs.

Bulb suggestions welcome!

https://store.waveformlighting.com/products/lux24-circadian-...

Thank you! They don't seem to have E27 bulbs, but I've actually come across their blog before looking for information.

There is an entire bio study about Circadian Rhythm by Dr Scachin Panda, highly recommend if anyone interested in tap into research. I am using one of his inspired app Ontime Heath to get my health back from COVID and working remote (with it's pros/cons), https://getontimehealth.com.

I would like to do something like this, but it would mean moving the smart bits from my switches to my bulbs, which I'm just not really willing to do. Right now, if I take a hammer to my Home Assistant server, all my lights still turn on and off at the wall.

A good option might be to move to those new Inovelli Blue Zigbee switches and pair them directly with the bulbs. But I've already swapped all the switches in my house once...

Currently doing this for my new home.

Using DALI as control-bus for our lights with products from Kiteo for tunable white they can go from 1.8k-16k with an CRI > 90 and be dimmable from 1%-100% as added benefit they can display the full RGB level aswell.

HCL is a very niche topic for residential lightning and certainly more expensiv than going with Hue but im betting that high quality HCL will improve our lives especially during winter seasons.

What do you use to control it?

KNX as Cabled Smart Home which talks to the DALI-Bus via a KNX-Dali-Gateway. And Home Assistant will control the dimming and light temperature via KNX.

If you have f.lux on a Windows machine and have Hue white/color ambient lights, you can already do this:

https://justgetflux.com/lighting/

I have this in my office setup, and it works well. Very nice, especially this time of year when it gets dark while I'm still working.

This looks amazing! I have been following home automation with a bit of skepticism, after all any fool can muck things up but to truly muck it up you require a computer and I dislike the traditional offerings due to privacy reasons.

But this is something along the lines of what I would hope home assistance would do as well as being all self-hosted!

I've used an app called Wake Up Light for a while with my Lutron dimmers and HomeKit. You set up some basic parameters and it generates a series of automations that gradually dims the light up to a specified brightness at a specified time. It makes waking up easier for me when it's dark outside.

While I'm a die-hard LED bulb consumer for its obvious longevity and efficiency advantages, I always wonder whether their seemingly invisible flickering messes up more with my well-being than the lack of light temperature and light brightness controls would. Would be nice to see some research on this.

Since when LED bulbs flicker?

A lot of cheaper ones do half-wave rectification on the mains voltage, so they flicker at 60hz (or 50hz). Slightly "better" ones will do full-wave rectification but no smoothing, so they flicker at 120hz (or 100hz).

A crap ton of decorative "Edison-style" bulbs have this cheap or non-existant circuitry in them. Buying from Amazon is a huge gamble. I have slow-mo video of disappointing lights.

The quality bulbs will power the LEDs from a smooth DC voltage and not flicker.

Exactly this - in age of most decent phones having no issue recording 1000fps videos, just record one with your lights. Heck even 240fps is enough. Suddenly those nice lights may not seem so nice anymore.

I wouldn't be surprised if this has some quiet smallish long term negative effect on our brains and eyes. In same vein as 24fps-is-enough-for-everybody was a lie

Wave a knife around in your kitchen with flickering lights. You'll see that the effect is not invisible, but an edge case. Just like with flickering LEDs on vehicles, you can't tell right away exactly where the vehicle is. Just having a flickering light on the edge of your peripheral gives you the same alert feeling when an object is moving fast near you, such as a fly. Also, flickering room light probably interferes with rendering of moving objects on a computer / TV screen (though the effect would be subtle and the bugs in the computer would drown them out).

'But Home Assistant papered over the vendor and hardware woes and made setup simple.' - goes on to describe the setup, that involves about 1257 steps, 37 different components, and 457 links to resources and products. Yeah, that was really simple, thanks!

Doesn't Hue do this already with a more elegant solution?

I have a Hue setup at home and I do something like this, but hackier through an iPhone app I set up 4-5 years ago (it hasn't broken yet and I haven't touched it); I believe there are more elegant software solutions these days.

This actually makes so much sense, as opposed to changing the colours on your laptop/phone. You want your electronic devices to just be darker, while preserving the original colours.

While making your LED lamps warmer is more pleasant to the eyes, without affecting how you view your screens.

FYI Apple devices by default adjust screen colour temperature based on ambient light temperature. (Branded “True Tone”.)

You could have saved all this trouble and just used time-tested incandescent bulbs. No offense but this whole article and thread is just getting each other to buy stupid crap.

LED lights have far more problems than color temperature not matching the circadian rhythm (if that's even a problem... I just avoid blue light in general). 99% of them flicker, even without a dimmer, and most probably have bad color rendering qualities (CRI) too. In my experience, they're all too cold. They'll also be too dim yet still give you that "getting blinded" feeling. I visited a $7500 apartment and it was laughable how they included LEDs that flicker at somewhere around 60-100Hz. I just stopped using LEDs until I understand the market more, after already wasting hundreds on failed attempts to find an acceptable LED. For now sticking with warm color temperature incandescent bulbs, which are almost perfect. I don't need to raise the color temperature in the day.

> No offense but this whole article and thread is just getting each other to buy stupid crap.

This is what home automation is. If there's any truly practical use beyond not overwatering a lawn that you should probably replace with native flora anyway I've never seen one. But this project is super cool! I enjoyed the read, also enjoy excessive automation with home assistant as a hobby, and thank you OP for sharing. We need more joy of tech for the sake of joy of tech.

As if incandescent lights aren't plagued with a lithany of issues of their own...

Electricity consumption, waste heat, short lifetime, ... Not to mention much less control over color temperature; you get what you get. With LED you just have more choice.

OK, you visited an expensive apartment which put no thought into its lighting. So? It'd have been a better experience if they'd put no thought into their lighting but used incandescent bulbs instead?

> It'd have been a better experience if they'd put no thought into their lighting but used incandescent bulbs instead?

Yes.

The Adaptive Lighting integration for Home Assistant has been doing this for years (https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting)

https://hueblog.com/2022/07/16/natural-light-new-function-no...

I would love to do this, but without running my own machines and doing all the hacking (as fun and educational as that seems like it would be!) What is the easiest route to getting lighting throughout the house to match circadian rhythm?

I use Home Depot's Wiz lightbulbs for this around my home. $10 a full-color bulb or so and each one individually connects to the home's wifi so there's no need for a hub or anything. The app works fine on my iPhone.

What’s the value? Sunlight is free for daytime, and soft white bulbs are cheaper than smart bulbs for nighttime. Traditional timers, switches, and the clapper can add ‘automation’ if necessary.

On this topic, I need to replace the 2x4 flush fluorescents (ballasts are bad) in my basement. Any suggestions?

Also looking for basic motion sensor to turn them off when nobody is down there.

Bypass the ballasts (trivial if you are comfortable with AC wiring) and buy a no-ballast led tube. The company I purchased mine from went out of business.

Make sure the CRI is above 90, assuming you care.

Circadian lights and dimmed (don't have color bulbs there) bathroom lights at night with motion sensor are alone a reason big enough to start this domotic journey.

If you're going this route, I'm pretty sure your LED strips must be RGBWW. Standard RGB strips won't be able to match the circadian lighting needed.

I think the sun was actually invented for this purpose

A bought a bunch of Hue bulbs to setup auto color temperature changing, but both my wife and I found we prefer warm white at all times. Oh well.

In San Francisco you can spot some of these at night. Look at the tall buildings, some of the windows are illuminated with a deep red.

Who needs to turn the lights on to go to the bathroom in a city? My bathroom don't have shades on the windows and I get enough light from the moon reflection and the street lights to do all I need to do in a bathroom in the middle of the night. It is not like I will put on contact lenses or look for a specific skincare product in the middle of the night.

I can understand night being dark when you live in the middle of nowhere. In the city not so much.

I mean if your bathroom windows were on the other side of the house or had no street lights shining into them, you wouldn't be able to see...

I've never seen any room with window in a city where it was completely dark during the night unless the window was closed with shutters and curtains. Even during new moon with a cloudy sky there is usually so much light pollution that it is never completely dark.

Not sure where you got bathroom from. The people I know who have this generally do their entire apartment.

Also it gets dark here at like 5:30

Who would put deep red lights at 5:30? Now I am even more confused.

A mix of 5500°k high-CRI LED and CFL in every room. Night is when I switch them off. Bang-bang control for the circadian rhythm !

Reminds me of the moonlighting on modern airliners. Blue to calm you down and warm reds to ell your body to sleep

Am I overthinking this or can I just use the Lifx bulbs an the sunset lights routine in the Alexa app?

Am I the only person deeply annoyed by this trend? Indoor lights are dim enough to begin with!

Even though I use and like ‘circadian’ lighting schemes, I am rather skeptical that modulating the spectrum of artificial light will do much to counteract the most blatant abuse of the natural circadian rhythm in modern life, which is to stay active for many hours after sunset.

Lights and hub from Ikea anyone? Super easy and the app works great for this.

[dupe]? This was submitted multiple times ago when it came out a month ago

Didn't realize there was an automation for it - neat.

Was doing this with HomeKit and Philips hue years ago.

Wyze smart bulbs have a sun match feature

2700K 90+ CRI bulbs + Dimmer

some hi-CRI bulbs even lower the colour temperature to mimic incandescents when dimmed.

Dimmer + Philips Warm Glow 2200K-2700K bulb

hello

In the beginning of Electric Light, all bulbs were 2500K (incandescent). Mercury Vapor lights started getting used outdoors, but eventually the lighting industry figured out High Pressure Sodium (blue-free), and Low Pressure Sodium (pure orange) for outdoor lighting. Halogens can be tuned, I think... Some Halogens are 3000K. Automotive halogens are much more orange/yellow than the halogens I have in my ceiling fan.

The two essential tools for creating a tolerable light in our modern world are dimmer switches and the using safe color temperatures for LED light sources.

> The most significant benefit I’ve noticed is that I can get back to sleep after getting up in the middle of the night—now that I’m no longer blinded by harsh overhead light in the bathroom.

My bathroom has too much light most of the time. If I was "working on my makeup" the amount of light would be just right, but that's not me. I bought my first dimmer switch at Habitat for Humanity. It was the kind that has a little lever next to the on/off switch - basically you decide on the amount of light, then it's pre-set to that amount.

The Habitat dimmer switch was okay, but I'd still walk into the bathroom from a black hallway and blind myself, as I never checked the light level before hitting the switch. On surveying the dimmers at Home Depot, I settled on the kind that starts "off", and gradually increases the light level.

My other dimmer switches are the classic round-dimmer option, and one that has a button and a big 'how much light do you want' .... "slide":

https://www.homedepot.com/b/Electrical-Wiring-Devices-Light-...

I have three bedroom light switches. Ceiling fan light has halogen bulbs with a slide dimmer. Outlet switch has a deep red LED bulb in a table lamp. There was a 5000K fluorescent above the closet that I replaced with a fixture from the thrift store, that has a mix of orange and red bulbs.

The kitchen has horrible hanging lights over the stove. Someone installed 3000K LED bulbs. I replaced these with incandescents and halogens, and installed a dimmer, but they were all terrible. Eventually I found some 2000K "Amber" Philips LED bulbs. These work with my LED dimmer, and are tolerable. With the Amber bulbs at least you're not staring into an artificial sun. If it was up to me, I'd get rid of the hanging lights and go back to the 90's light canisters in the ceiling.

tl/dr: Good lighting is invisible. Bad lighting forces people to stare into artificial suns. "5000K" light sources are for plants, NOT people. To protect eyes, slide dimmers that always start with the minimum amount of light are the greatest.

Good dimmers have adjustable 'minimum' settings. Often a simple plastic screw behind the plate that you can tweak.

Philips 'warm glow' bulbs are warmer when dim, and cooler when bright. I use these throughout. In combination with smart dimmers that allow setting the 'on power' in HA. At sunrise and sunset the on-power for my dimmers is reset to 100% and 30% respectively.

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