[RELEASE] Eternal Sunshine (luminescence and dimmers)

Hi,

Here is an app I've written and been testing for a while now and I think it is ready for its first official release.

This app allows you to adjust your dimmers with luminescence values parsed by one of your light sensors.

It also manages motion so to avoid conflict with other lighting motion apps.

You can adjust the sensitivity and reactivity of the app by adjusting some values (in settings) to fit your specific needs and luminescence.

Don't hesitate to send me your feedback.

6 Likes

uhm ... is there a link to your app? :grin:

3 Likes

Opps... corrected thanks

2 Likes

Your app is exactly what I was looking for. I installed it and am getting these errors in the log. Is it serious?

1 Like

Hi @rbrown3rd and thank you for using Eternal Sunshine and your feedback. In order to troubleshoot this I'd also need your settings page. Can you also make sure you're using the latest version? From what I can see, for now after a quick look, this shouldn't happen. I'm still looking into it but your settings page would greatly help.
Thanks again for your precious feedback.

UPDATE
I think I have figured out what is generating this error messages while not affecting the main dimming operations. I'm pushing now an update to fix this. Let me know if it works now. Thank you.

Okay, Thanks so much. Here is my settings page. I will update to the latest version and see how it works.

Thanks so much for the quick bug fix. That seems to have fixed it. The logs are not showing any errors now.

Is the relationship between Luminance levels and light levels linear? I find that when my sensor luminance, (outdoor Bloomsky), gets below 3100, my lights should be coming up petty strongly. Right now my luminance is a little above 3100 and my lights are set to 1%.

If I set a best guess limit for the luminance sensor max and select unknown, will it still establish a maximum based on actual readings?

This is a great app. I appreciate your work in developing it.

Investigating this right now. Found what causes this. Update very soon.

Cool. Thanks.

The app is working great. Luminance is declining and lights are ramping up. Thanks so much for a great app. How about a sensitivity setting or a response curve feature in the future? It may not be an issue because I haven't lived with it long enough to see how it responds. Thank you very much.

Okay, luminance is down to around 3,000 lux, but my lights are set at 1%. Earlier, at a higher lux, the lights were brighter. Something isn't quite right or i am not understanding the intent of the app. Here is an excerpt from my logs.

1 Like

Thank you,
Let me know if the update I just pushed fixes the problem. It seems it's related to the "other app" option I have implemented.
Let me know, your feedback is very useful as I can't test it in all possible scenarios.
I'm also currently working on another improvement within the algebra, should be released within a couple days.

Dont forget to update the settings once you've pasted the new code.

FYI: if you enable the "other app" option, your lights will never turn off but go down and stay at 1% instead. This is meant to prevent conflict in very specific cases and you may not need to enable this option. Use it only if the other app managing these lights depends on their "on/off" status.

I strongly suggest using the motion management IF you already have a motion lighting app working (and disabling this other app).

Thanks for the update. I'm installing it now and will monitor it tomorrow. I will let you no how it goes. Looking good so far.

The app is working fine and I have a couple of observations. As you pointed out earlier, you do not want to have any routines outside the app that reduce any lights you are using to a level of 0. I had one routine that turned all of my lights completely off at night. I changed that so that it reduced them to a level of 1.

I took a look at solar radiation throughout the day at my geographic location for this time of year and found this curve. It is kW/m2 not lux, but the shape of the curve is all I cared about. For my purposes, light on cloudy days, I would like more sensitivity at the edges of the curve. Take a look at this:


You can see that to light my spaces when dark clouds pass over, a frequent event where i live, I need a way to get a quick response from my lights at the steeper portions of this curve. My observations are that this occurs when the illuminance drops below 3100 lux at my location. I see a couple of possibilities. One would be some way of tweaking the response of the app within the app by changing the response curve. Another might be just to arbitrarily change the solar max setting for my outdoor sensor.

I love the app. Please don't take my comments as criticism, but rather just thinking out loud. I would enjoy hearing your thoughts on this.

I reinstalled the app this morning and removed my presumption of max luminance for my device and clicked on the function to allow it to determine the max based on first 72 hour readings. After struggling with trying to convert kWh/m2 per day to lux, I decided it would be easier to just let the app figure it out.

I think you will like the last update I just pushed :slight_smile: It's still beta but from what I can see it's working. Go to the settings and enable "use logarithmic variations"

Thanks, Going to get it now.

FYI: I have pushed one more update today to improve the math and make it more adaptable to conditions like yours. In a near future I'll allow users to define the sentivity.

Thank you so much for being so responsive. Today was not a good test of the app as it was the first sunny day in a series of stormy, dark days. I will update to the latest version after I send this. I appreciate your work and talent very much.