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Comment by rjprins | Hacker News Reader

One of the biggest impacts on my life recently was adding an automation for my smart lights (Philips Hue) in the living room.

The lights start dimming over a span of 2 hours until they are their minimum at 22:00.

The result is that it just feels like it is time to go to bed. I have always struggled with getting plenty of sleep and not staying up too late and this has had a tremendous effect the past two months.

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I like this too, but I found it fails badly in a very common use case: I want the lights on brighter because of <thing>. So I do that, but then the automation starts fighting with me because it wants to dim the lights again. Very frustrating.

One of the folks I play board games with has this installed. Great for when they want reminders to go to bed: Not so great when we need the lighting to better see the table. So much fiddling with the light - I generally wish there were a simple override for stuff like that and honestly, it has turned me off such a system.

I just started using the newer Phillips Wiz. It’s trivial to override the automated rhythm in the app. Normally $12-15. Black Friday sale $7/bulb but still might be available at Home Depot for $10/bulb.

Its a tradeoff. The automatic fade / transition of Hue is really well done. Its where the system shines IMO. But if you want to be able to interrupt the process, you lose the previously sent transition. You have to do all the logic manually if you want to be able to bounce between the two.

My experience is that if you interrupt a single transition in Hue in any way (i.e. changing the brightness during the “Fade duration”) that it simply cancels the transition and will not attempt to override what you have specified. I imagine the problem arises from if you have multiple “automations” for different steps of brightness, in which case there isn’t a good way for the system to know if you intended to override future automations too.

I guess the HomeKit integration with Hue is the problem then.

Its just how the Hue hub works

I am using Hue via HomeKit, and it works differently. The automations are not cancelled, they continue.

Yes, transitions are a single command to the hub, so any subsequent update will override your previous. You need to write a lot of logic that captures the current state and target state then retriggers the fade when appropriate (e.g. after a debounce).

I did not have this experience. Interrupting the automation once cancels it completely in Hue.

You are experiencing what the article describe. What if you add this common scenario to your system? i.e. Making this manual override normal to the system, starting to dim with a new calc a bit faster or shifting the final dim time (based on user pref)

I solved this problem with dim lamps and no other lights. When the sun goes down my natural light goes away, and the lamps are just the right brightness. Much easier and no fiddling with automation.

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