I started a company to pursue circadian lighting (called Twist) and sadly pivoted away from it as a core value proposition because of weak reception from the market.<p>I feel we were 20 years too early (we shut down about 5 years ago).<p>Our tech enabled smart circadian lighting (we called it adaptive lighting) without configuration, an app, or wifi. The lightbulbs worked without any smart gadgetry necessary.<p>Every time the switch turned on the light made a 20 ms computation based on the time it stored (via a low power clock and a super cap) and turned to the right brightness and color temperature automatically. This was protected by a patent but also could not find a buyer for the tech despite how differentiated it was<p>Now I have an entire home with hue downlights + bulbs that does circadian lighting (with HASS as well) and while its not nearly as elegant of a solution as Twist (aforementioned startup), it is pretty great and a huge life changer to me and my fiancè.<p>Edit: for context we use Philips Hue downlight retrofits + bulbs in other fixtures, all white ambiance, and Lutron Aurora dimmers, connected to HASS on a RBPI, running adaptive lighting from HACS
FWIW, Apple HomeKit + Hue has supported this for a few years (fall 2020?), they call it Adaptive Lighting, and for me this has been a killer app.<p>It's kind of a bummer that Hue doesn't support it natively, but since I was already in the Homekit ecosystem, it was fine for me.<p>I've paired this with powerful Sowilo [1] light strips, which have excellent warm/daylight white range and brightness, and it's kept S.A.D. in relative check.<p>[1] <a href="https://sowilodesign.com" rel="nofollow">https://sowilodesign.com</a> I'm sure some people can come up with a cheaper solution via AliExpress than Sowilo's, but having a turnkey solution that integrated with Hue was essential for me.
I don't really see an advantage to this over just installing fixed warm color temperature lights in the house. Depends on the building I suppose, but a well designed house should have enough natural light to only use the lights at the time when you would want 'warm.' If you live in at high latitude and need a 'SAD' light for morning and daytime use, that will always be a different light fixture and system, and therefore doesn't require this type of setup either.<p>Ultimately, regular indoor lights just aren't bright enough to engage the biological response of daylight, regardless of color temperature.
<i>> In the evenings, after the sun sets, the lights dim, and it gets harder to read and work on projects—that’s a feature. It’s a signal that it’s time for bed.</i><p>Here in Boston the sun will set at 4:30 today, but that's way too early to be starting to send my body "time to go to bed" signals.
This reminded me of the video by DIY Perks building an "artificial sunlight" for their office: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw</a><p>The amount of effort is unbelievable, but I'd love to have something like this at home. I can only imagine the impact on my productivity during winter evenings…
Did you know that the actual, original, F.lux works with Philips Hue!<p><a href="https://justgetflux.com/lighting/" rel="nofollow">https://justgetflux.com/lighting/</a>
Done this for the past 6 years running a combo of cheap zwave color temp adjusting lights, smart things, and a smart things app automation called circadian daylight.<p>Guide/Forum:
<a href="https://community.smartthings.com/t/circadian-daylight-smartthings-smart-bulbs/13623?page=11" rel="nofollow">https://community.smartthings.com/t/circadian-daylight-smart...</a><p>Makes the evenings more laid back and I'm able to sleep a bit easier. Well worth the effort to get it setup.
F.lux has always bothered me, because despite their very large volume of supporting papers[0], what I've never seen is a consistent link between the "blue light" from those many studies directly back to my real computer/tablet/phone screen.<p>I wish there were more studies done <i>with</i> computer monitors, rather than light boxes directly.<p>[0] <a href="https://justgetflux.com/research.html" rel="nofollow">https://justgetflux.com/research.html</a>
While I haven’t gotten my lights set up like this, I do use home assistant, just like the author and it is simply amazing. For things like this, the setup can get quite complex, but the main benefit is that it provides a unified interface to any connected device in your home.<p>My main use case is energy tracking: it does a marvelous job collecting and graphing data across a bunch of different sources: from the solar panels from one vendor, the semi proprietary smart meter protocol my electricity company has, weather data etc. Having all that data together in 1 place is an invaluable tool to make any investment decisions on energy improvements to our house.
Is there any evidence F.lux and similar actually do anything other than make pretty lights? I mean, that's fine enough if that's what you want but I often hear health or sleep claims made. Are those substantiated in any way?
If you're interested in HomeAssistant to solve this problem, I wrote a simpler implementation, [1] of using the sunrise/sun position sensor to change scenes for a room's lights. This didn't involve having a Zigbee hub like this post suggests, mostly because all my lights were Hue, or Zigbee-compatible (IKEA-branded Tradfri lights) that were already on my Hue bridge.<p>I found this worked for me, since I only needed to create four automations:<p>- What happens if the lights are turned on after/before sunset (2)<p>- What happens if if the lights are already on after/before sunset when it changes (2)<p>This implementation seems more around more fine adjustments to brightness/colour/colour temp, but mine's more geared towards "Is the sun down? Change the scene."<p>[1] <a href="https://mattdemers.com/sun-specific-light-automations-with-homeassistant/" rel="nofollow">https://mattdemers.com/sun-specific-light-automations-with-h...</a>
I wish something like this existed for TVs. Since I got my eyesight procedure 10+ years ago, I soon noticed I was quite sensitive to lights that didn't affect me at all (maybe my vision was too bad to even notice, don't know). That extreme sensitivity faded off in the first six months, but I still get annoyed by some lights and the first thing I do with a new PC/Phone is setting up Redshift[1] or Twilight[2], and although I'm not a big TV consumer, the times I do watch it, I wonder if there's a market for this kind of features.<p>1: <a href="https://github.com/jonls/redshift" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jonls/redshift</a><p>2: <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid.lux&gl=US" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid...</a>
Some years ago when I lived in the north, I built probably the shoddiest circadian lighting that exists (and still operates).<p>It is an ESP board with some MOSFETS soldered on a perf board, connected to a huge RGBW LED strip and powered by a beefy power supply I found. 230V cables barely covered and the perf board naked to the elements.<p>The ESP hosts a page that displays sliders to control the light, which send a websocket command to change the PWM duty cycle. I implemented a lamp temperature to RGB that I found on God knows where, and then had a python script on a raspberry pi to slowly raise brightness and color temperature for sunrise etc by sending directly the websocket commands.<p>It is a single C++ arduino file with all the html and Javascript as big char arrays. It is horrendous. But hey, been running for years and I know I will never touch the code again anyway :)
I use incandescent and halogen everywhere and don't have a problem with color temperature. Also, the CRI of my bulbs is incredible.<p>My house has maybe 20 light bulbs in it, most of them under 75 watts, except for a couple of strategic halogen fixtures.<p>Sometimes I think about getting LED smart lighting, but then I think about how many iterations of setups I would have to go through it get everything dialed in, all the e-waste I would be contributing to, all the plastic, all the security vulnerabilities, all the software updates, all the glitches, all the flicker from cheap PWD circuitry and I decide to stick with simple glass and red hot metal.
Ha, I've been doing this manually for years. I found smart lights that could get as low as 1850k and then put them in key areas in the house. After the kids go to bed, I try to limit all lighting to 1850K (as well as using that color temp on all screens that I use at night).<p>Of course I'm just one person so it's all anecdotal, but it definitely has helped my sleep in a noticeable way since I did it.
I've been doing this for years with Lifx bulbs: <a href="https://github.com/adamjacobmuller/lifx/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/adamjacobmuller/lifx/</a><p>Works really well. Lifx bulbs have excellent CRI (proper color temperature adjustments, not just fumbling with RGB) the only downside being they are not cheap. Worth it IMO though.
For curious buyers, this is already more or less built in:<p>- Philips Hue + Hue Hub : the default Hue app can do this, leveraging Hue Labs "Feel better with light" that runs from the hub so you don't need a laptop or other device after the formula is installed.<p>- Apple HomeKit Adaptive Lighting + Hue or Eve -- I'm a big fan of Eve light strips. See more accessories here: <a href="https://www.imore.com/best-accessories-with-homekit-adaptive-lighting" rel="nofollow">https://www.imore.com/best-accessories-with-homekit-adaptive...</a><p>Beyond those, there are other options w/o getting too tricky:<p>- Hue + Hue Automations + LivingScenes (or similar) + shift at sundown/sunrise<p>- Hue Labs (various other options)<p>- Third party apps like HueDynamics, and f.lux itself<p>- IFTTT: <a href="https://ifttt.com/connect/weather/hue" rel="nofollow">https://ifttt.com/connect/weather/hue</a><p>For what it's worth, the Philips Hue white bulbs that vary the white temperature are great, with a better fuller white than the full color bulbs.
Adaptive Lighting is also a good option for Home Assistant: <a href="https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting</a><p>I've automated all the lights in my house using Zigbee switch / dimmer modules behind the light switches on the wall. This was a very affordable option, but unfortunately I can't change the color. I can only turn lights on and off or change the brightness. I'll have to think about getting some ceiling lights with adjustable color temperature whenever I move to a new house.<p>One thing I really like about my current system is that it still works without any internet or network connection, or if my Home Assistant server is offline. The light switches just function normally. I think this would be a bit more complicated with controllable ceiling lights, but it could probably be done via Zigbee binding and a Zigbee wall switch.
I'm doing this with HomeKit, Homebridge and Nanoleaf A19 bulbs.<p>It's cool having my basement office lighting switch to evening mode (they dim slightly), have the color temp adjust, all at the same time my Mac switches from light mode to dark mode.<p>HomeKit is pretty powerful if you're willing to bolster it with Homebridge and use an alternate app for configuring it (I use Controller for HomeKit).<p>For example: I have an automation that opens/closes my garage door as I arrive/depart as long as my phone is in CarPlay mode. Yes, I could push the button on my rear view mirror, but it's one less thing to do. Glueing this together required a Personal Automation that updates a Homebridge dummy switch which tracks my phone's CarPlay status. Then I could make a HomeKit automation which triggers on my phone's location but only when the switch that track its CarPlay status is on.<p>That said, as a developer, I do sometimes wonder why I'm not just using Home Assistant.
I'm currently looking to retrofit my place with variable color temperature lights. In industry parlance, it's is called "Tunable White". On one hand, non-hobbyist industry has a ton of great hardware options. High CRI, high R9, guaranteed lack of white point drift, 0.1%-100% dimming (although 85 CRI and 10-100% is most of what you'd typically find at Home Depot), etc.<p>My issue is that there are several competing control standards (with 0-10V being the more common but primitive one for America), and plenty of them (like PoE Ethernet lighting - super cool IMHO) are very much commercial-only. And stuff like Lutron's RadioRA is quite proprietary, with not much interoperability.<p>On the other hand, going with Phillips Hue or similar will lock me into that ecosystem - which also dictates which lights and switches I could use.
Lighting was the first and still most meaningful smarthome thing I've done, though I did it much more manually. Hue bulbs don't require any sort of WAN link, the hub(s) will work fine purely via LAN (though without firmware updates sadly without opening a hole), and of course one can then remote in with a VPN (via a bounce/mesh if you don't have a fixed IP) like anything else LAN-based. And 3rd party apps can seamlessly deal with multiple hubs. This is a fun read because I've been considering moving to Home Assistant, primarily because I'm worried about what happens when the hubs inevitably fail. 10+ years after its launch Philips has still never bothered to implement and backup/restore functionality(!!!), so that's a real driver. But in terms of pure functionality it's worked very well to code up a bunch of manual timers and time-of-day-based options on switches.<p>And in terms of QoL impact it's been a pretty big deal for us. For context I live near the Canadian border, so not Alaska-level in terms of differences in night/day over the course of a year but far enough north that it does vary quite a lot. Being able to have a whole "sunrise" scene for the house, to have "daylight" with varying use of color and brightness (I've added 2 or 3 way bulb systems to a bunch of lamps to deal with Hue color bulbs not having as much brightness range as would be ideal), and warmth at night has made it so much easier to maintain proper sleep cycles. Rather then an audible alarm, I have a 15-minute animation of "sunrise" I put together that gently wakes me up and by the time it's getting to the whiter/bluer portion I'm set, I head down without any grogginess even when it's still black out. This all works for motion sensors too, and I've been able to massively cut down blue light emission and emission period of outdoor light at night without compromising safety and that I think is quite important for wildlife. There has been research on rampant blue light (and artificial light in general) affecting insect populations, which are under pressure anyway.<p>I think Smart Home kit is powerful and can be (and certainly has been) misused. I will not touch anything with any sort of internet requirement, I segment things onto their own VLANs, and I'd be more cautious about it for things without the same visible indicators or with more potential side effects. But it has a real place too, and lighting is a perfect use case. I hope efforts like Matter pan out, the real issue is how vertically tied a lot of stacks are.
If you would like to achieve this based on simple dimming, or even better, by using smart switches instead of smart bulbs, take a look at NASA spinoff Bios Lighting.<p>Here's their A19 (normal bulb) specsheet: <a href="https://bioslighting.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/BIOS_A19_SpecSheet_v2.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://bioslighting.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/BIOS_A19...</a><p>There is also a spotlight-style BR30: <a href="https://bioslighting.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/BIOS_BR-30_SpecSheet_v5.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://bioslighting.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/BIOS_BR-...</a>
I would like to recommend Adaptive Lighting in favor of Circadian Lighting. It has the added benefit of being able to detect if someone manually adjusts the brightness or color, and then stops the automatic adjustment for that light.<p><a href="https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting</a>
This is a big part of what I like about sleeping in the bush. You suddenly rediscover what it means to be embedded in natural cycles: feeling fresh in the morning, sleepy in the evening, lethargic on a rainy day, hungry 3-4 times a day, etc. It's incredible how quickly it comes back, and how good our modern infrastructure is at deregulating it.
I tried the 'Circadian lighting component' before on my Home Assistant setup. However, the component made my lose control over certain devices (even though I configured it that I should be able to override the temp/brightness settings). It either kept lights off when I turned them manually on, or visa versa. So now I just reverted back to 'Automations' per room that are triggered by motion sensors and activate one of the predefined scenes. Each room has aprox 3 scenes: day, after sunset, and night. The automation trigger the scenes based on predefined times. I agree with the author that it's really great to not get blinded by bathroom lights in the middle of the night. The automated motion activated scenes per room/ time also give a very luxurious effect when e.g. entering the living room in the evening and it automatically toggles a cozy dimmed light scene.
There are light bulbs that will automatically decrease light temperature when they are dimmed (e.g. Phillips with "Warm Glow"). There is no use case for either warm bright or cold dim light.<p>Made the installation much simpler for me, because you can use standard dimmers without an extra communication path for CCT.
I recently added a similar feature to the absolutely terrible code I've hacked together for controlling my smart lights[0]. I used python's astral package to get the highest and lowest sun elevations for the day, then define the lights' warmth at both, and at elevation == 0. Every 15 min a cron job sets the lights' warmth accordingly.<p>This is for a room with very little natural light, where the lights are on most of the day. Having them respond to the position of the sun lets me still feel the rhythm of the day outside.<p>[0]: <a href="https://git.sr.ht/~h4n1/z2m-scripts" rel="nofollow">https://git.sr.ht/~h4n1/z2m-scripts</a>
I am testing atm theory that cycling environment color temperature from cold to warm and back to cold in 90 seconds boost your performance in monotonic work by at least 15%. There is some old publication somewhere accoring to my sources, but I could not find it.
How about a pair of goggles with a filter that can dynamically adjust the amount and color of light that gets through to your eyes. So, no matter what the environment you're in, your eye always get the right light at the right time?
Relevant article from The Onion:<p><a href="https://www.theonion.com/woman-who-drinks-6-cups-of-coffee-per-day-trying-to-cut-1819579770" rel="nofollow">https://www.theonion.com/woman-who-drinks-6-cups-of-coffee-p...</a>
I can't work out how this could actually work (if your smart color changing lights are just paired with regular switches).<p>1. It's midday, your lights are bright and blue
2. You turn the switch off. The bulb (and ESP) no longer has power.
3. It's 9pm; you turn the light on.<p>Would you not get bright blue light for a second or two until it had a chance to sync? You can get timely local execution with something like Tasmota but it has no consistent internal clock, so you're at least one network hop away from it taking proper state.
The problem with solutions like this is that color rendering index of RGB LEDs is abysmal to the point that I can't really stand it. I ended up just using 2300K high CRI bulbs throughout.
There is an entire bio study about Circadian Rhythm by Dr Scachin Panda, highly recommend if anyone interested in tap into research. I am using one of his inspired app Ontime Heath to get my health back from COVID and working remote (with it's pros/cons), <a href="https://getontimehealth.com" rel="nofollow">https://getontimehealth.com</a>.
I would like to do something like this, but it would mean moving the smart bits from my switches to my bulbs, which I'm just not really willing to do. Right now, if I take a hammer to my Home Assistant server, all my lights still turn on and off at the wall.<p>A good option might be to move to those new Inovelli Blue Zigbee switches and pair them directly with the bulbs. But I've already swapped all the switches in my house once...
Currently doing this for my new home.<p>Using DALI as control-bus for our lights with products from Kiteo for tunable white they can go from 1.8k-16k with an CRI > 90 and be dimmable from 1%-100% as added benefit they can display the full RGB level aswell.<p>HCL is a very niche topic for residential lightning and certainly more expensiv than going with Hue but im betting that high quality HCL will improve our lives especially during winter seasons.
If you have f.lux on a Windows machine and have Hue white/color ambient lights, you can already do this:<p><a href="https://justgetflux.com/lighting/" rel="nofollow">https://justgetflux.com/lighting/</a><p>I have this in my office setup, and it works well. Very nice, especially this time of year when it gets dark while I'm still working.
This looks amazing! I have been following home automation with a bit of skepticism, after all any fool can muck things up but to truly muck it up you require a computer and I dislike the traditional offerings due to privacy reasons.<p>But this is something along the lines of what I would hope home assistance would do as well as being all self-hosted!
I've used an app called Wake Up Light for a while with my Lutron dimmers and HomeKit. You set up some basic parameters and it generates a series of automations that gradually dims the light up to a specified brightness at a specified time. It makes waking up easier for me when it's dark outside.
While I'm a die-hard LED bulb consumer for its obvious longevity and efficiency advantages, I always wonder whether their seemingly invisible flickering messes up more with my well-being than the lack of light temperature and light brightness controls would. Would be nice to see some research on this.
'But Home Assistant papered over the vendor and hardware woes and made setup simple.' - goes on to describe the setup, that involves about 1257 steps, 37 different components, and 457 links to resources and products. Yeah, that was really simple, thanks!
Doesn't Hue do this already with a more elegant solution?<p>I have a Hue setup at home and I do something like this, but hackier through an iPhone app I set up 4-5 years ago (it hasn't broken yet and I haven't touched it); I believe there are more elegant software solutions these days.
This actually makes so much sense, as opposed to changing the colours on your laptop/phone.
You want your electronic devices to just be darker, while preserving the original colours.<p>While making your LED lamps warmer is more pleasant to the eyes, without affecting how you view your screens.
You could have saved all this trouble and just used time-tested incandescent bulbs. No offense but this whole article and thread is just getting each other to buy stupid crap.<p>LED lights have far more problems than color temperature not matching the circadian rhythm (if that's even a problem... I just avoid blue light in general). 99% of them flicker, even without a dimmer, and most probably have bad color rendering qualities (CRI) too. In my experience, they're all too cold. They'll also be too dim yet still give you that "getting blinded" feeling. I visited a $7500 apartment and it was laughable how they included LEDs that flicker at somewhere around 60-100Hz. I just stopped using LEDs until I understand the market more, after already wasting hundreds on failed attempts to find an acceptable LED. For now sticking with warm color temperature incandescent bulbs, which are almost perfect. I don't need to raise the color temperature in the day.
The Adaptive Lighting integration for Home Assistant has been doing this for years (<a href="https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting</a>)
I would love to do this, but without running my own machines and doing all the hacking (as fun and educational as that seems like it would be!) What is the easiest route to getting lighting throughout the house to match circadian rhythm?
I use Home Depot's Wiz lightbulbs for this around my home. $10 a full-color bulb or so and each one individually connects to the home's wifi so there's no need for a hub or anything. The app works fine on my iPhone.
What’s the value? Sunlight is free for daytime, and soft white bulbs are cheaper than smart bulbs for nighttime. Traditional timers, switches, and the clapper can add ‘automation’ if necessary.
On this topic, I need to replace the 2x4 flush fluorescents (ballasts are bad) in my basement. Any suggestions?<p>Also looking for basic motion sensor to turn them off when nobody is down there.
Circadian lights and dimmed (don't have color bulbs there) bathroom lights at night with motion sensor are alone a reason big enough to start this domotic journey.
If you're going this route, I'm pretty sure your LED strips must be RGBWW. Standard RGB strips won't be able to match the circadian lighting needed.
Even though I use and like ‘circadian’ lighting schemes, I am rather skeptical that modulating the spectrum of artificial light will do much to counteract the most blatant abuse of the natural circadian rhythm in modern life, which is to stay active for many hours after sunset.
In the beginning of Electric Light, all bulbs were 2500K (incandescent). Mercury Vapor lights started getting used outdoors, but eventually the lighting industry figured out High Pressure Sodium (blue-free), and Low Pressure Sodium (pure orange) for outdoor lighting. Halogens can be tuned, I think... Some Halogens are 3000K. Automotive halogens are much more orange/yellow than the halogens I have in my ceiling fan.<p>The two essential tools for creating a tolerable light in our modern world are dimmer switches and the using safe color temperatures for LED light sources.<p>> The most significant benefit I’ve noticed is that I can get back to sleep after getting up in the middle of the night—now that I’m no longer blinded by harsh overhead light in the bathroom.<p>My bathroom has too much light most of the time. If I was "working on my makeup" the amount of light would be just right, but that's not me. I bought my first dimmer switch at Habitat for Humanity. It was the kind that has a little lever next to the on/off switch - basically you decide on the amount of light, then it's pre-set to that amount.<p>The Habitat dimmer switch was okay, but I'd still walk into the bathroom from a black hallway and blind myself, as I never checked the light level before hitting the switch. On surveying the dimmers at Home Depot, I settled on the kind that starts "off", and gradually increases the light level.<p>My other dimmer switches are the classic round-dimmer option, and one that has a button and a big 'how much light do you want' .... "slide":<p><a href="https://www.homedepot.com/b/Electrical-Wiring-Devices-Light-Controls-Dimmers/Slide/N-5yc1vZc34iZ1z17l41" rel="nofollow">https://www.homedepot.com/b/Electrical-Wiring-Devices-Light-...</a><p>I have three bedroom light switches. Ceiling fan light has halogen bulbs with a slide dimmer. Outlet switch has a deep red LED bulb in a table lamp. There was a 5000K fluorescent above the closet that I replaced with a fixture from the thrift store, that has a mix of orange and red bulbs.<p>The kitchen has horrible hanging lights over the stove. Someone installed 3000K LED bulbs. I replaced these with incandescents and halogens, and installed a dimmer, but they were all terrible. Eventually I found some 2000K "Amber" Philips LED bulbs. These work with my LED dimmer, and are tolerable. With the Amber bulbs at least you're not staring into an artificial sun. If it was up to me, I'd get rid of the hanging lights and go back to the 90's light canisters in the ceiling.<p>tl/dr: Good lighting is invisible. Bad lighting forces people to stare into artificial suns. "5000K" light sources are for plants, NOT people. To protect eyes, slide dimmers that always start with the minimum amount of light are the greatest.