For the last two years I’ve been using Home Assistant to run a sunrise-simulation alarm clock in the bedroom to wake us up. This works very, very well and — for us at least — a home automation killer app.
In continuing to optimize things I wanted a bulb that has an even-dimmer and warmer initial brightness than the IKEA TRADFRI LED2101G4 (in an E26 to E12 adapter) I’ve been using. I’ve now settled on Philips Hue White and Ambience 60W A19, as it’s both lower brightness and warmer at initial turn-on and has a brighter high end, making it more usable when working on things around the bedroom.
With the Lighten Up! I had used a halogen bulb, which combined with the dimmer, made the initial brightness so low the filament was barely visible with the naked eye. This made the initial-on not noticeable and didn’t jar me awake. To try and replicate something similar I considered the Shelly Dimmer 2 and putting a halogen bulb back in place, but I wasn’t really wanting to go back to bulbs that give off so much heat and use so much power. And while I find Shelly devices well engineered, I wasn’t very interested in more WiFi IoT devices. (I really prefer Zigbee or Z-Wave for security reasons.)
Thanks to this /r/homeassistant thread I was prompted to try some Hue bulbs, so $76.31 to Amazon later and I had a pair. They easily adopted directly into HA and after a little tweaking (mostly adjusting automations for the new devices), I’m happy with them. The warm/low setting is really quiet dim and yellow-reddish, and at full brightness it’s… nicely bright.
I may tweak the curve used for bringing the brightness up, but thankfully the script I use (Ashley’s Light Fader 2.01) has a whole range of curves available. I’m currently using the default easeInSine, but this morning it seemed to hit the final brightness a bit abruptly, so I may try something like easeInOutSine.
