Best way to do "pre-staging" for Circadian lighting?

I have tuneable white lights in my living room, and I'd like to have them transition from 5500K to 2200K starting at 9:15pm (sunset on June 21st in my part of the world) and going to about 1am.

All three lights are permanently "on", so they can receive commands, even if the light is off.

I tried doing this using Rule Machine:

I left the level blank, as I wanted this to handle just the colour temp, whether to the light was on, or off.

This is apparently not the best way to handle this, as the lights are also getting turned on ever time a new colour temp is sent to them.

Suggestions?

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Some drivers will have an option for pre-staging that needs to be turned on, some lights don't do pre-staging at all, I'm no expert with color/CT bulbs but knowing what bulb make/model you have might help.

Also did you see this app that might be of interest...

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I have two Philips Hue bulbs, paired directly to HE as Advanced Zigbee CT bulbs. There is no "pre-staging" option with that driver, but I did notice this...

That might be what is turning the lights on, but I doubt it as the lights are coming on with each temp change at their previous level, and not 5%. I'll set it to "no selection" and see what happens tonight.

The third is an Zwave RGBGenie, which is not coming on, and doesn't have an option like that.

Is anyone able to tell me why my Hue bulbs keep turning themselves on? How to fix it?

I read through the thread on the Circadian Daylight app, it looks like they were juuuust about to implement Pre-staging, and the thread was closed.

Is there a better way to do this?

You may want to change from the Advanced CT driver to my Hue specific drivers that support pre-staging (I use it for the same purpose of changing CT temperature during the day) so you can change the color temperature when the bulb is off and it will stay off.

If you have an issues with the driver just post in the thread.

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Thanks for your work doing this driver! The only hurdle I had to overcome was using the Philips Hue phone app to update my bulbs via BT, once that was done, the bulbs performed flawlessly using your driver.

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Apologies if it’s been addressed elsewhere but I am at a loss and can’t find what I am looking for through searches.

Maybe I need it spelled out, but once I’ve paired/configured my compatible hue bulbs with your driver on HE, how do I enable and deploy pre-staging?

I built the hue natural light scene in HE by creating a hub mode for each of the 6 natural light scenes. Four of these 6 scenes/hub modes are set to change based on time, but my “good morning” and “good night” modes are tied to buttons and switches.

Since all of these lights are tied to sensors and switches I am at a loss for how to accomplish the following:

  1. Pre-stage all 6 of the different hub modes so that the respective CT/level is ready to go on a motion or switch trigger

  2. Smooth transition across the different CT/level when a change occurs if lights are on.

You could use Room Lighting for almost all of this and not worry about pre-staging. Just set up light periods based on the hub modes and set up your Means to activate and turn off. Select adjust lights on hub mode changes and put in a transition time.

If you did not want to use Room Lighting, you would need to use Rule Machine. The rule would be fairly straightforward:

Trigger: mode becomes xxxxx
Action:preset color temperature/preset level

The catch to the is actions is that you need to select “run custom action”, select actuators, and then the device. This should give you all possible options with two or three of them being prestaging.

For the transition between modes, you’ll need a separate rule and some if/then logic. If light is on, fade color temperature over X amount of time else Prestage color temperature.

Room Lighting can handle all of this and is probably easier to use, but the above is the general idea.

The best way is subjective. So many ways to do things with the hub.

In my case I use a hub variable to hold the color temp and level. Then when the lights turn on it uses the variable so I don’t have to pre-stage.

I have a custom app that runs once a minute to calculated the values based on several rules. I typically adjust the values over several hours and it works nicely.

I use RM and mode changes to create & trigger/run a very simple circadian lighting schedule. Works well for my purposes.

Agreed 100%. I also use a hub variable that calculates CT throughout the day and have it set Hue scenes that are appropriate. It works really well for my needs.

@RxRated below is a sample I whipped up so you can see how it might work.

In this case, when my mode becomes sunrise/sunset, it will prestage a hue bulb to 3000 only if the light is off. This isn't how I do my circadian lighting but shows you an example of how to do it.