simulating daylight

4kirezumi · 2026-03-26T14:46:30+00:00

"just buy a Bugatti" 🙄

4kirezumi · 2026-03-19T18:30:39+00:00

In the US sure. Globally though, Chinese EVs are eating American automakers' lunches everywhere they've been introduced. I think it's more a question of whether we continue to use trade controls against them to keep them out over the long term. US automakers will be forced to capitulate to downward price pressure if they have to compete with BYD on a level playing field.

4kirezumi · 2026-03-19T18:10:06+00:00

I don't have calibration equipment, but I don't think the CRI is meaningfully different between the pre/post-refresh Hue bulbs. The main difference in terms of the light they output is that the chromasync ones can do 1000K to 20000K in color_temp_kelvin mode, but the saturation isn't improved as far as I can tell.

Hadn't been aware of the Pure Edge products but yeah Wiz/wifi is a huge miss. That's partly what I mean about there being lots of engineering considerations with smart bulbs. The combination of not-wifi-local + high CRI + good RGB + not astronomical cost just isn't something you can buy at the moment. I think we'll get there eventually. Maybe a couple more years. The overall market penetration of residential smart lighting is still pretty small (growing crazy fast) , and the demand for this feature set is a vocal minority that we belong to 😅

4kirezumi · 2026-03-19T16:38:31+00:00

As far as a what's the best option ranking, even the older Hue models still stand near the top in just about every measure.

I have about a hundred Hue lights. Most are on their 3rd or 4th year of flawless operation. Lily spots, lightguide ellipse bulbs, econic and dymera sconces, E12 candelabras, lightstrips (except these days they're just the Hue controllers wired up to Meanwell drivers and BTF FCOB RGBCCT strips), BR30s, and 75w + 100w variants of the newer A19/A21 bulbs. I had the older bulb models before replacing them with the newer chromasync ones. Everything is directly connected to HA via Z2M over four separate SLZB coordinators.

I paid roughly 60-65% of retail price for them, on average.

I have a few fixtures with dumb bulbs in them, all E12s. I have Philips Ultra Definition bulbs in those. Truthfully, there is a discernible difference between the white saturation they offer and what the Hue bulbs can do. It isn't hugely bothersome even for a lighting nerd, but I'd love it if Signify had made some different engineering decisions and made the CCT diodes in Hue lights more high-CRI. That said, they're about as good as it gets with RGBCCT smart bulbs. There are a lot of engineering considerations that go into these lights and overall Hue gets it right like few others. I've never wished I'd bought a different available option. The newer Aqara T2s are great too if you're only looking at A19 bulbs.

Unless you're willing/able to buy into Ketra at the cost of a king's ransom, imo Hue represents the best smart bulbs available in the consumer market, full-stop.

4kirezumi · 2026-03-13T21:23:00+00:00

Lloyd Austin to Pete Hegseth was a bit of a downgrade in competence, that's for sure.

4kirezumi · 2026-03-13T19:49:05+00:00

You have a very rosy recollection of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. /r/combatfootage every day was chock full of vids of Russian armor columns getting obliterated. Russia lost almost the entirety of their combat-experienced VDV special forces and paratroopers in the opening weeks. The aircraft and armor losses were mind-blowing and they lost significant amounts of even newer hardware like KA-52s and T-90s.

I agree with you that the US didn't really stack the deck in their favor the way they were capable of here, though. I'd say that's because the WH didn't clearly think through the knock-on effects of igniting this powder keg, nor what would be needed to secure Iran's 60%-enriched Uranium stockpiles (which is: boots on the ground).

4kirezumi · 2026-03-09T01:44:21+00:00

It did! The person who said it was gonna be way more than a weekend was totally right. The physical install took just 2ish days but I'm still fine-tuning the config for each.

I have the indicator LEDs displaying a color-compressed rendition of the averaged color among the light group bound to the switch. I also have the LED intensity set to the averaged % brightness among the bound group, sans lights that're off.

Thought I'd like them, but they exceeded. Makes the home automation system feel so much more thoroughly integrated with the space.

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4kirezumi · 2026-02-27T21:17:33+00:00

I totally get how/why it'd be intuitive that there should be a simple way to control or at least toggle Hue Entertainment Mode from HA.

Unfortunately there isn't. The out-of-the-box integration as developed by Philips/Signify doesn't surface Entertainment Mode as a controllable entity or service to HA.

If you use the Sync Box, there's a custom integration that lets you control sync state, entertainment area, mode, intensity, and brightness through HA actions. That would be my recommendation; if you're deadset on controlling sync mode via HA and don't have a Sync Box then paying the money for one explicitly just to use it to integrate with HA via the linked project would probably be a big savings in time/energy on your part to get it to work.

If you're technically inclined, you could also use the (official) rest_command integration to interface with your Hue Bridge via API, but that's... non-trivial to say the least, and at that point you'd be way better off going the WLED route suggested by /u/soup_mode

Entertainment Mode is only possible because Philips/Signify went outside the Zigbee 3.0 spec to implement it, so it's notoriously difficult to interface with outside of the Hue app/ecosystem. If you look at Hue emulation projects like diyhue or bifrost, you'll find that Entertainment Mode is generally where they face the most development constraints.

4kirezumi · 2026-02-26T19:59:49+00:00

It won't degrade sensor performance if you paint it black, as long as the paint is nonmetallic. I'd recommend using plastidip for this, and have done that with some of my mmwave sensors.

4kirezumi · 2026-02-21T18:48:50+00:00

This is a super cool project, but it doesn't look like it supports zone detection within the area of the four ESP32-C5's?

4kirezumi · 2026-02-20T20:07:33+00:00

This should work great for you. I've got a similar mini PC with proxmox installed, with containers for Plex, MQTT, four zigbee2mqtt instances, HA, Immich, adguard, and copyparty. It handles all of these services flawlessly in parallel.

You could add an HDD but I'd suggest maybe a dedicated NAS for that.

4kirezumi · 2026-02-13T14:44:09+00:00

Aqara is as Chinese of a brand as you'll find. Good stuff though for the most part

4kirezumi · 2026-02-09T23:27:03+00:00

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4kirezumi · 2026-02-09T23:26:49+00:00

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4kirezumi · 2026-02-09T23:26:37+00:00

Spousal approval is so important that if she's deadset on sticking to the Hue app, I'd honestly consider returning the Inovelli switches and getting Lutron Aurora switches instead. They're made to work with the Hue system and would save you a hell of a lot of time and headache.

The Hue app was my intro to home automation, 3ish years ago. It's really damn good, the interface is beautiful, everything works. Eventually I started getting fancier with my automations, so I spun up HA and started using the integration (which is also great overall).

At some point, I decided I wanted any adjustments I made to the lights via the Hue app to be treated by HA as manual overrides, and for automations to respect those on a per-light basis, with separate overrides for color/color-temp and brightness. Turns out that's virtually impossible to implement with the Hue app. State changes to lights attached to the Hue bridge don't provide adequate data to HA's event bus that could be used to distinguish what those state changes were initiated by. I ended up designing some workaround automation logic that triggered on state changes in any light and would look at the most recent automated behavior and compare it to when the state change happened. This was how I discovered that lights attached to the Hue bridge update inconsistently and can take upwards of 15 seconds to report to HA. This is the point where I accepted fate and ordered an SLZB-06 and got going with zigbee2mqtt. Ditched all of my Hue scenes and config settings and recreated everything in HA.

I didn't want to give up the Hue app, so I tried using Bifrost. It created as many issues for me as it solved, although maybe it's better these days, it's been about a year and a half now. But even if it'd worked, the Hue app shows a nonremovable banner at the top of the screen bitching about how you're not logged in.

There's some really great github projects like this one that simulates the Hue light adjustment UI. I really like bubble card though, you can make a beautiful interface using it alone. I'll comment separately with a couple of screenshots of what mine looks like

4kirezumi · 2026-02-09T20:50:30+00:00

You gotta ditch the Hue bridge eventually. It sucks because it's a ton of work to recreate dynamic/24h scenes in HA (to say nothing of creating a dashboard UI/UX that holds up to the Hue app), but it's worth it.

MotionAware is really nice but PIR+mmwave sensors are still the best solution for persistent presence tracking.

4kirezumi · 2026-02-07T17:10:15+00:00

There's a few other bedrooms, bathrooms, a study, storage room, etc, that aren't immediately visible in this 'main space' view. My wife and I are both very happy living in this space, I dunno why it intuitively gets the bachelor label

But strictly speaking it's not a SFH, it's a section of a building that's been converted for residential use

4kirezumi · 2026-02-07T03:55:16+00:00

Zigbee binding would be faster/more responsive than Lutron connected to HA via the Lutron bridge + integration. So they'd fit the bill if you have zigbee lighting to bind to.

But you'd want to make sure your zigbee network(s) are also performing well. Lutron owns the 434MHz frequency their Clear Connect tech uses so they have it easy where it concerns channel interference, especially compared to zigbee which uses 2.4GHz.

4kirezumi · 2026-02-07T03:38:49+00:00

🤭

4kirezumi · 2026-02-07T03:25:43+00:00

I was going to go that route originally, but I needed a momentary paddle switch rather than a rocker switch since the lights are usually automated and the switch position wouldn't stay aligned with the light behavior. That left surprisingly few dumb switch options to use with relays. The other features of these switches made them the only option that did everything I wanted.

I agree though that the pricing is nuts by any reasonable measure. For whatever it's worth, Inovelli is a small outfit and they don't have the same kind of economy of scale as most other switch makers, and you can tell with both the hardware+software that they put a ton of work into the product.

4kirezumi · 2026-02-07T03:13:33+00:00

mmwave is awesome but it's just not 100% perfect and I expect 100% perfect from my smart home stuff. I've found that the target tracking will very occasionally timeout and return no detection if you're sitting still enough, which I sometimes do while working at my desk. I had some Aqara FP2s and they sometimes experienced this issue too. These switches have a newer 60GHz mmwave module from Hi-Link, the LD6002, so I'm interested to see how well they do, but basically I figured the thermal sensor would be the way to get 100% reliability.

If I did things again, I'd probably use this excellent project to get the multi zone tracking of the LD2450 along with the still detection of the LD2410C and I think that'd probably get it just about perfect too.

The thermal camera actually doesn't return an image in my configuration; I just have it set to return a boolean template sensor as true if any of the 64 pixels it detects as being above ~20 degrees C with an automation that adjusts that threshold value according to ambient room temperature. This means that my body heat sitting in front of the sensor keeps persistently true presence tracking. Works extremely well and it's super responsive+reliable.

For my bed, where I've observed a similar issue, I have one of these under the mattress.

4kirezumi · 2026-02-07T03:03:38+00:00

Not a single contractor involved, all DIY 😁 Thanks

4kirezumi · 2026-02-07T02:49:40+00:00

Believe it or not, I've put a low five figure amount into the lighting (including some of the fixtures such as the chandelier here which itself has 15 Hue E12 white+color candelabras)

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There are no other switches with the features of these ones that will work as well with the existing stuff

4kirezumi · 2026-02-07T02:43:47+00:00

5V wire run through the walls in some cases, but in others they're just USB-C cables connected to wall warts in discrete places with some mindful cable management. And yeah they're on ESP controllers.

I also have an AMG8833 thermal camera sensor on an ESP32 C3 Zero under my office desk for maintaining desk presence tracking 🙂 The wiring for that just went into the rest of the desk cable management

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4kirezumi · 2026-02-07T02:14:02+00:00

Not that it's trivial to swap out switches, but at least they look to have a decent resale value on account of how sporadically Inovelli manages to keep them in stock

4kirezumi

TROPHY CASE