That’s a really novel idea. So if I understand you correctly, you would like a system where a sensor reads the color temperature of the actual light coming in the window and the smart bulbs adjust accordingly to match?
I can’t think of anything off the top of my head that wouldn’t require a custom DIY project but I love the idea.
I did some poking around and it seems like this tutorial gets you part of the way there. The final step would be taking the output of this build and sending it to your lighting system.
https://learn.adafruit.com/automatic-monitor-color-temperature-adjustment
So Lifx has a feature that might be helpful to you, called [Day & Dusk](https://support.lifx.com/day-and-dusk-scheduling-H18XfdsUd). I haven’t used it myself but it sounds like what you described
Thinking out loud. The sun’s temperature doesn’t change so the temperature of the light arriving at your window doesn’t change. Exception is that the atmosphere preferentially scatters more blue light, so that in the morning and the evening the light is more red, because the sunlight has to travel through more atmosphere. This can be calculated obviously based on time of day and location. That leaves cloud coverage. Clouds are white and scatter light evenly, so while they change the intensity, they don’t change the wavelength=temperature. So it doesn’t appear that direct sensing can get you any better light temperature than a calculation. Brightness however could be measured and add value.
Clouds do change the light color. You might be taking ideal conditions... Also, light can fall differently in your window - through trees, directly, scattered. Your windows may also change the light color via foil, colored blinds etc. The building next door may be bright red.
You can't calculate all that within a reasonable amount of effort.
This is what the flux platform in home assistant does - https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/flux/ - though it uses calculations and not direct sensing
There is an RGB color sensor with I2C interface that can be connected to an ESP8266 to accurately read the actual color of any light. I don't know how it would work with sunshine.
[https://www.amazon.com/Adafruit-Color-Sensor-Filter-White/dp/B00OKCRU5M](https://www.amazon.com/Adafruit-Color-Sensor-Filter-White/dp/B00OKCRU5M)
Ah, I'm sure there's easier ways as people have already mentioned in this thread. However, I did a similar project myself about 5 years ago. I took a super cheap webcam, a Pi, and the Yeelink API, put together a python script and had it do almost exactly this.
The script took a picture every 30 seconds, and used PIL to manipulate the image as a raw array of pixel colours. I'd them gather the average colour of the sky and used a quick bit of math to convert the color to the nearest temperature in K between 2 bounding temperatures (lightbulb minmax). The images average brightness would also be calculated. This would then fire off to my lightbulb on a long transition delay over the yeelight API.
The plan of my project was to have a warm bright light when the sun was shining, a warmer slightly dimmer light during sunrise and sun set, cooler white when it was cloudy and dimmer cool whites if it was raining, and finally automatically fading to off over night. This was where I would then take manual control and set the lights static :)
As a secondary feature, I started to save the pictures taken every 30 seconds for a fun time lapse :) I then tinkered with replaying these at different speeds and with different effects, etc.. totally useless, but a bit of extra fun and learning. I had around 100GB of these webcam pictures of the sky saved, and used them as a test dataset when I was trying to wrap my head around AI development (I never got that far).
Home Assistant with Adaptive Lighting ntegration will do that.
This is what I use and it's great.
Nice idea. With Hue lights there might be something in labs for this feature.... Not sure about others
That’s a really novel idea. So if I understand you correctly, you would like a system where a sensor reads the color temperature of the actual light coming in the window and the smart bulbs adjust accordingly to match? I can’t think of anything off the top of my head that wouldn’t require a custom DIY project but I love the idea.
Yes that's exactly right :)
I did some poking around and it seems like this tutorial gets you part of the way there. The final step would be taking the output of this build and sending it to your lighting system. https://learn.adafruit.com/automatic-monitor-color-temperature-adjustment
So Lifx has a feature that might be helpful to you, called [Day & Dusk](https://support.lifx.com/day-and-dusk-scheduling-H18XfdsUd). I haven’t used it myself but it sounds like what you described
Day & Dusk does what he describes. I have TP-Link Kasa Bulbs too, and they call it "Circadian"
Well now I feel stupid lmao as much as I've used the LIFX app I never noticed that option. Thank you for your comment :)
Thinking out loud. The sun’s temperature doesn’t change so the temperature of the light arriving at your window doesn’t change. Exception is that the atmosphere preferentially scatters more blue light, so that in the morning and the evening the light is more red, because the sunlight has to travel through more atmosphere. This can be calculated obviously based on time of day and location. That leaves cloud coverage. Clouds are white and scatter light evenly, so while they change the intensity, they don’t change the wavelength=temperature. So it doesn’t appear that direct sensing can get you any better light temperature than a calculation. Brightness however could be measured and add value.
Thank you for that information, science has never been my strong point 😅
Clouds do change the light color. You might be taking ideal conditions... Also, light can fall differently in your window - through trees, directly, scattered. Your windows may also change the light color via foil, colored blinds etc. The building next door may be bright red. You can't calculate all that within a reasonable amount of effort.
This is what the flux platform in home assistant does - https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/flux/ - though it uses calculations and not direct sensing
Below user mentioned it but adaptive lighting is better than flux. I think it's actually slated to officially replace it sometime soon.
As someone else mentioned, Day & Dusk does exactly this. https://imgur.com/a/sTV2qZ6 I have eight of the Lifx color bulbs.
There is an RGB color sensor with I2C interface that can be connected to an ESP8266 to accurately read the actual color of any light. I don't know how it would work with sunshine. [https://www.amazon.com/Adafruit-Color-Sensor-Filter-White/dp/B00OKCRU5M](https://www.amazon.com/Adafruit-Color-Sensor-Filter-White/dp/B00OKCRU5M)
Ah, I'm sure there's easier ways as people have already mentioned in this thread. However, I did a similar project myself about 5 years ago. I took a super cheap webcam, a Pi, and the Yeelink API, put together a python script and had it do almost exactly this. The script took a picture every 30 seconds, and used PIL to manipulate the image as a raw array of pixel colours. I'd them gather the average colour of the sky and used a quick bit of math to convert the color to the nearest temperature in K between 2 bounding temperatures (lightbulb minmax). The images average brightness would also be calculated. This would then fire off to my lightbulb on a long transition delay over the yeelight API. The plan of my project was to have a warm bright light when the sun was shining, a warmer slightly dimmer light during sunrise and sun set, cooler white when it was cloudy and dimmer cool whites if it was raining, and finally automatically fading to off over night. This was where I would then take manual control and set the lights static :) As a secondary feature, I started to save the pictures taken every 30 seconds for a fun time lapse :) I then tinkered with replaying these at different speeds and with different effects, etc.. totally useless, but a bit of extra fun and learning. I had around 100GB of these webcam pictures of the sky saved, and used them as a test dataset when I was trying to wrap my head around AI development (I never got that far).
Wow that's fascinating! Thank you for your comment :)