What's some examples of color animations? Anything like wake up patterns or sleeping patterns etc? We've had some color bulbs for awhile but haven't done much with them. What some cool stuff to do?
We used to use an Elmo red light/green light alarm clock for our kids so they wouldnāt wake us up too early. They have long since decided that Elmo is for babies and refuse to allow the clock in their room.
However, I still use LED strip lights to turn on to red and yellow at bedtime (alternating the colors every night automatically with a variable, so thereās never any fights over who was red vs. yellow the night before).
And each morning when their appointed wake up time rolls around (which I can also change as needed by setting the wake up time with a variable), the lights turn green so they know they can get up.
Whenever someone opens the shades or turns on the overhead light in their room (both are Lutron devices and tied into Hubitat as well), the strip lights shut off.
Thatās my only use for color changing lights. I still have some extra Sylvania LED strips that I might setup in a few spots around the house to serve as motion-activated pathway lighting at night with red color at a low brightness level so as not to disturb night vision. Havenāt gotten around to that yet.
I have all of my RGBW bulbs change to the color BLUE if any of the leak sensors in the house detect water. This helps to improve my response time to such an issue, instead of simply ignoring yet another notification on my phone. I believe some others have used specific colors on lights to indicate a door or garage door being left open for too long. I find these types of uses to be very practical, but not very impressive when showing off one's home automation system.
Well, I'll give this example. The idea is not original with me - Jared Zimmerman (@jared.zimmerman) started a thread a while back on monitoring the waste level in the Litter Robot's drawer, and I implemented using rules that are now ported to RM 5.1.
We have light strips under the vanities in our three bathrooms. The rules below monitor the level of poop in the Litter Robot drawer, and change the color of the lightstrips from green to yellow to red as the drawer fills. When the level in the drawer becomes critical (the Drawer Full Indicator flag, tripped by an IR sensor above the drawer, becomes set), the under vanity lights start flashing. On my wife's insistence, the under vanity lights in the bathroom off the bedroom are navy blue during bedtime, and neither flash nor change color as the drawer fills. To handle the case of power fails and Litter Robot activity during power fail (the Litter Robot has battery backup), there is a Reset rule that is executed on systemStart to reset the monitoring logic.
These rules and light strips mean that we never have to check on the Litter Robot. We are notified when the drawer becomes full. The driver for the Litter Robot was ported by Dominick Meglio (@dman2306) from SmartThings. It's a fine driver.
Simply for the sake of completeness, my full System Start rule is given below - the only Litter Robot piece of that rule is the very last rule action, which calls the Litter Robot Reset rule. Not important for this example, most of the rest of the System Start rule initializes the logic for a power fail set of rules that implement a voting of the Ring Extender Gen 2 devices and initiate shutdown if more than 4 of the 6 Ring Extender devices go on battery. This ensures that an orderly shutdown occurs even if one or two of the Ring Extender devices go bad for some reason, and ensures that no power fail shutdown happens if one of the Ring Extenders is pulled out of the socket (as by, for example, someone vacuuming or moving furniture).
Here are the rules:
I have a few RGBW bulbs dotted around in lamps rather than fixings. They're never the main source of light.
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If any of the smoke, gas or CO alarms are triggered they flash red and the main (white) fixture lights in the house turn on. HE announces which alarm has been tripped on the Google assistants.
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I have a door sensor on the garden shed that acts as a burglar alarm. I arm/disarm it with passcodes via dashboards & Google assistant. When armed and triggered it flashes the lamps red. Google announces there's "a wanker in the shed" and the garden floodlights switch on.
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I have a "good night" routine programmed and linked in to Google. Everything switches off and the hub checks for open downstairs windows. If they're all closed the lights turn green. If any windows are open the lights turn red and Google announces which window is open. In both scenarios the lights revert back to soft white after 30 seconds and then switch back to being motion activated.
I have scenes set up that adjust colour and brightness dependant on time of day.
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These are really useful for reducing eye strain when on the PC at night - after a lot of tinkering I found a fairly dim pale pink seems the best.
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The scenes are also used for lighting the way to the bathroom during the night. A dim reddish light that doesn't shock the senses when coming from complete darkness.
The possibilities are endless. I've seriously thought about weather linked scenes which are entirely possible. Dry/sunny = yellow. Rainy = blue.
The next addition to my setup is probably going to be smart lock. Depending on its level of HE integration it may well end up being part of an RGBW bulb based rule.