I’ve been using “smart” bulbs to provide some color to the white box of an apartment I live in. I keep on feeling like the weakest link in this is the software.
Because what I want, as someone trying to design her lighting, is multiple playlists. One playlist might be for the studio: blue/green at 8am, to make me happy, awake, and energetic when I work; change this to something orangey/reddish around 6pm to suggest that maybe it’s time to quit working, and then deepen towards a very dim red as bedtime approaches. And then there might be another playlist for the studio for when I want to sit in the reading chair and read: lots of bright white near that chair, reds elsewhere in the room from 8am-7pm, then everything starts getting dimmer as night approaches. And other playlists for different moods.
(And other tricks like the foyer: during the day, I’d love for it to have a few different colors based on the outside temperature, so I can quickly decide which coat I want, then fade to red in the evening.)
(And of course I also want some kind of location awareness: turn the lights on and off when my phone goes in and out of the house, staying aware of the current playlist…)
A bulb, I think, should store the current playlist on itself; when it’s turned on at the wall switch, or turned on by software, it should check the current time and pick the appropriate color from the playlist. Simple, integrates with the existing wall switches. (LIFX bulbs store the current color across a power cycling; Hues do not.)
What I get in all the software I’ve tried is a series of arbitrary time triggers. At this point in time, set these bulbs to these colors. If they’re on at the wall switch. If I want to change to a different mood of decor throughout the whole day, it’s a laborious process of changing triggers. Less laborious than repainting every wall would be, sure. But still enough work that it’s not something I’m going to do lightly.
I dunno. It really just feels like all the software is thinking at too low a level for me. It’s closer to useful than it was back in the 70s or something, when my dad’s studio had individually controlled sets of red, green, and blue incandescent bulbs, but it’s still just not automating a lot of the stuff I find myself doing. “Oh I’m up and want to work, let’s see is it a cloudy day or a normal day.”
It doesn’t help, of course, that there are really not any standards. Everyone has to build their software pretty much from scratch. Maybe HomeKit will help unify this for me, though I’m really not holding my breath.