How do you organise bedroom lighting. My bedroom lighting is still dumb, and I'd like to give it a bit of elevation.
I've got everything in there - motion sensors, smart lights, buttons, and presence sensors.
How do you manage to keep the 2nd person in the room happy if there are differing sleep times. And let's face it, most of us tinker in the wee hours of the morning.
This is what I'm thinking.
Motion lighting as per rest of house, except when the following.
If wife is present AND virtual switch ON, OR I am present AND virtual switch is ON.
Virtual switch: On Android, have Tasker send a message (via Maker API) if the phone is face-down and charging via cable. If either of the the phones is cable charging & facedown, then flick virtual switch to disable motion lighting.
The trick would be to only cable charge the phone face down when sleeping at home. I use charging pads mostly, except overnight. Besides, it's pretty easy to make sure that messages are not sent if out and about, by (say) only sending messeges if connected to a specific wifi network.
I use a combination of presence sensors and virtual "sleep" switches for every person to put the master bedroom and entire house to sleep (tracked via virtual switches). Nothing runs when the bedroom is in sleep mode.
I do pretty much the same, but stops at 21:00. I found if its any later, manual switches come into use and its far safer than going down the "WTH do you think you're doing? Don't turn things off please" route hahaha.
I realized early on that I could automate my house but not my wife...especially when it comes to night time habits. So I created a simple automation that covers most of the scenarios and also a manual override (physical buttons) for everything else.
I have a Night mode that can be activated via voice or dashboard. This shuts down the house and leaves a path to the bedroom lighted for 3 minutes. Then shuts everything outside the master bedroom off. This also turns off the motion lighting in the bedroom and turns on the lights underneath my bed in case one of us is sleeping but we still need to see when we get to the bedroom. At the bedside I have pico remotes (one each) that control the lamps (caseta plug in dimmer) but are also tied to my button controller app so if I press and hold the bottom button, it shuts off any lights associated with the bedroom (closet and bathroom included). This way if we get up in the night to use the bathroom and forget to turn off the light, we can just tap and hold and back to bed we go. The bathroom lights shut off on a timer but when you want to get back to bed as soon as possible, 30 seconds is an eternity.
With all that setup, as I said earlier, my wife is not a creature of habit, so I have to be able to manually control everything I just mentioned at the entrance of the bedroom. For this I have a Remotec zrc-90 that let's me individually control every light in the bedroom and toggle the motion activation in the bedroom (with audible confirmation via Alexa TTS). It might seem complicated but it was developed organically through time based on feedback from my wife. I'm still waiting for the next scenario that I'll have to adapt to but this setup has been good for months now.
The ZRC-90 button device with push/hold/2xtap for each button.
As for motion sensing - So far I've tended to stay away from main rooms and high traffic areas. That may change as my experience and confidence with the system grows.
In our master we have sconces above the bed (on either side). Opted not to put in light switches in the wall by the bed in case we wanted to move the bed in the future. Instead am using sengled smart bulbs and 2 Smart Things buttons one for each side.. Each button toggles it's related sconce with one click and two clicks toggles both sconces. Seems to be a very simple/intuitive way to manually control lighting.
So far these have worked really well and the price was decent. We keep them on our side tables. WAF seems to be okay so far.
My wife IS a creature of habit - and it does not really involve most things automated sadly. I also have to be able to keep things under manual control at most points.
This is not really a bad thing - keeps me grounded for real world / real user type applications.
Between 'bedtime hours', bedrooms are no longer automated. Manual paddles on the wall can do a host of things including turning on and off the lights and scene setting, with single and double clicks. For example a double click down, puts the room in Sleep mode (easy for me due to Rooms Manager, not as easy using virtual switches and RM but still equally possible), which halts automation for those times outside of normal schedule.
I also use routines on Alexa and Pico buttons in the rooms so that manual scene setting can occur, for example if the wife wants to read.
I was faced with this EXACT issue. I tried a bunch of different software based solutions that tried to know when my phone was charging. They all failed miserably. I found my charger intermittently stops charging when the battery is full. Thus creating an issue. I have a period called "quiet time". This represents when one person is in bed (1 phone charging). Myself or my husband. When quiet time is active, the only lights that activate to motion are a set of lightify's lining the bed frame at 20%. Just enough light for the other to move around. The mode triggers flawlessly at any time of day. Other lights interact differently in quiet time, but not related to the bedroom lighting. This is how I intended it to be. I actually modified our qi chargers with a button and contact sensors. This is a link to my project. I have rules set up for this as well. If it's something you're interested in exploring, I'm happy to share my rules as well. I prefer our house to react to us. I don't want to have to consciously turn on or off a virtual switch for my house to change modes or control lights. Most of my modes are based on those two qi chargers. It's been wonderful.
I only started on this last week. Took me a while to get started, but wasnt as a big a project as I thought. I've got it working well.
At night time: whenever either my wife or I charge our phones by plugging in the cable, and place the phone facedown, it calls local end point which flicks a switch, causing the bedroom to go into "quiet time", thanks @april.brandt. When we both have gone to bed, the mode changes to NIGHT, and turns on the alarm.
Upon wake up, the reverse occurs, and it's working well. The split second the phone is unplugged, the house wakes up for the first person, and the room wakes up for the second.
I'm also using variables in tasker to stop it spamming the local end points multiple times per day, although that's not a huge problem as we have wireless charging points around the home (but not the bedroom).
Local end points will stop this rule in it's tracks it if I'm ever on vacation. Initially I was using cloud end points, but local is far superior. For testing purposes, I've also got who is still in bed on my dashboard - and it could be considered stalking or abuse!
I do hope tasker solves this for you. I always had obstacles with it. Never got it to work right. But mine was based more on charging. Maybe that was my mistake. Glad I could throw out some inspiring ideas for you. Thanks for mentioning me.
I have placed motion sensors under each side of the bed which turns a lamp on dim for each respective side of the bed. Have not automated the main light in the bedroom as I tend to rarely use it.
Yes, I'm using tasker on Android to accomplish this.
I have a tasker profile called George gone to bed. When three things happen
Power = AC ( I only charge my phone via AC in bedroom)
Orientation = face down
Tasker Variable = 1
Then it calls a calls a tasker task, which is a local end point (set up in HE) and sets tasker variable to 0.
When I get up in the morning, that is, take my phone off power (unplug, not just turn over phone), then it sets tasker variable to 1 and calls different local end point in HE indicating that I'm up.
The local end points are triggers in HE. Use local end points, so that you're not doing crazy stuff to your home when you're on vacation.
Tasker is pretty cool with HE. I've got a menu system that I use, based on a widget. I'll post a video of it later.
The iOS Shortcuts App has the potential to be able to do this too, but unfortunately seems to lack such useful things as charging state and orientation.
do you know if this is now feasible with the updated shortcuts (even if just charging state)?
I know there is a "get charge level" but didn't see a "if charging"
