We currently have our morning alarm tied to a 2 button Pico. Up for on, and down for off. Pretty simple and it works quite we. The Up/Down essentially pauses and unpauses a rule that controls our morning alarm.
The only problem with this is that we have no visual indication that it works. When you set an alarm clock, you can look over and see that little indicator beside the alarm. I'm looking for a similar solution.
I think I can throw a coloured light under the bed as an indicator.
Looking for some very low cost solutions or recommendations on this.
Sengled bulbs are pretty cheap and are natively compatible with Hubitat (as long as you get a Zigbee model, not any of their Wi-Fi products). I wouldn't fill my house with them, but one bulb for a specific purpose should be totally fine. That being said, if you have any smart switches like Inovelli, HomeSeer, or the upcoming 700-series Zooz products, I think the above idea is pretty neat, too--and it saves you from needing to use a specific device for this purpose.
Something else you might want to consider besides an entire device just for this purpose is something you can use to confirm that the alarm was set, or at least that the hub "heard" the Pico. Flashing the lights in the room a couple times, sending a push notification to your device, or doing an announcement over TTS (if you have any compatible devices like Sonos or could create an Alexa routine to announce it triggered by a fake/virtual sensor, for example) are some things I can think of. Just some other ideas that might not require new things!
I don't know if you're an Alexa user, but for this use case, where it's just an indicator and not mission critical, I would be tempted to just get a single cheap WiFi bulb that is Alexa compatible.
Use the Virtual Motion Sensor with Switch device to trigger the bulb in an Alexa Routine to the color you want. Yes it's cloud based and prone to unreliability, but for what you're using it for, it just needs to work most of the time.
Otherwise, for inexpensive Zigbee (not very good color, but good enough), the IKEA Tradfri bulbs are just $20
So I did consider changing the light switch for one with an indicator, but we are heavily invested in Caseta, and I didn'T want to mess with the look of the switches.
Your idea of using TTS is brilliant. I do have a Sonos speaker in the bedroom and think that this is the most subtle way of getting a notification on the alarm,
I did play around with TTS but could never find a good use case for it... until now.
Do newer ones implement the Zigbee hue/saturation (hs) color model? I have one from maybe 2018, and it only implements XY, which makes using it on Hubitat very difficult (either directly or via the Hue Bridge API, which does not abstract this detail away, though it doesn't matter in the Hue app itself since it supports all color and CT models).
On the subject of bulbs, I'm perhaps (in)famous for Hue bulbs on Hue being my real preference, but that's a bit of an investment for one thing, even if you ask me. (But if I had unlimited money, this might be a cool application for a probably-vastly-underutilized lightstrip.)
Good point. I’m thinking on the Alexa lines and triggering via virtual motion with switch driver over Hue, but the OP didn’t mention he had either of them. You wouldn’t lose control of the bulb if the cloud went offline, but you’d lose color control that way as well.
In regard to Hue being some of the finest color bulbs, I would agree. And it is my preference too. Separate bridge for the bulbs eliminates any poor Zigbee repeating issues over lightbulbs, and the numerous third-party software available for a Hue bridge is a great tool for lighting.
In my case I don't need individual bulb control for most things (maybe a couple of table lamps at most). All lighting in my house is controlled by either a lutron dimmer or switch. I realized early on in my HA adventure that simply turning off individual pot lights is silly when I can just dim the whole thing to the level I want. Same with individual hanging lights (and then it doesn't work at all when someone accidentally hits the power light on a smart bulb in a chandelier or whathave you) Nope, switches for me...
First, I don't like their color temperatures, and that's mostly what I use RGBW for. Their warm whites don't get as warm as other bulbs I've used, and I really like that temperature for late evening (Hue's "Relax" scene is 2250K at about 1/3 brightness, and they're one of few that can convincingly produce this--without switching to HS/RGB mode and guessing at something close). Additionally, they have weird behavior with some CTs, like visibly becoming cooler as the brightness is lowered at CTs below ~2700K.
Second, I don't think most Zigbee smart bulbs work well when paired directly to Hubitat right now. I had problems with them not accepting commands if something like a setLevel() and setColorTemperature() were issued in quick succession, something I frequently did as part of apps or scenes. (I'm not talking about the mesh problems many bulbs create on mixed networks; this was when I attempted using a dedicated "Zigbee bulb" hub.) Issuing these commands twice with a small delay usually worked around the problem. Fewer bulbs also fared better than more when used at the same time (specifically part of why I said I wouldn't "fill my house"). I think staff have figured out some possible improvements here that will make it into 2.2.5, so hopefully that will help. I know I wasn't the only one with this problem, as there are several posts about similar issues here.
Finally, Hue has some nice features now, like default power-on settings. They've also long had "true" Zigbee scenes (Hubitat has support for Zigbee groups, but "scenes" are just emulated with potentially multiple commands to different devices). Even Hue groups tend to work better than Hubitat groups, despite both being real Zigbee groups whenever possible (e.g., I can instantly turn off all Hue lights in my house; Hubitat direct takes a few seconds and "popcorns"). I also enjoy using native controls (Hue Dimmer, for example) as a backup in the rare case my hub is down (rebooting for an update and I'm walking into a new room, for example) and the built-in Alexa integration (with all bulbs, groups, and scenes without needing to put Hubitat in the middle). Obviously this last paragraph, if not all of my pickiness, is way irrelevant for the simple task asked by the OP, but since you asked...
(But if I had unlimited money, this might be a cool application for a probably-vastly-underutilized lightstrip.)
