Up until a couple of weeks ago, we used a Philips Hue bridge and had it connected to Home Assistant. Things worked well. Then, of course, I decided I could improve it. Here’s how I moved all of my lights to be locally-controlled and moved away from the Hue bridge altogether.
Category: Smart Home
Intro
As I’ve mentioned previously, we’re using Phillips Hue and Home Assistant for most of our lighting. The Phillips Hue bridge is connected to Home Assistant, and I’m using the HomeKit Bridge integration to add the lights to Apple’s Home app – the bridge is not connected directly to HomeKit. This has been incredibly stable, however, it comes with a downside: we’re unable to use Apple’s adaptive lighting functionality.
Home Assistant, however, has its own integration for Adaptive Lighting. The documentation can be confusing, however, and it took me over six months to get it working the way I wanted to. Hopefully this post saves someone else some time!
Taking a page out of Apple’s book, I realized I’m going to be writing about this regularly, so the naming will reflect that from now on. If you’d like some historical context, please see my previous posts on the subject. If you’d like to see all of the data on a spreadsheet, I recently updated Mike and Joyce’s Smart Home Inventory.
We recently completed a major home renovation, which gave us the chance to rethink everything. For context, we added an addition, completely rebuilt the kitchen, and modernized the existing footprint of the house.
I can’t believe it’s been almost 3 years since I wrote about this! Things have settled down a bit, so I figured I’d post another follow-up.
It’s been just over a year since my last post about smart home stuff, and I wanted to write about some of the stuff we’ve changed since then. Here we go!
Last spring, my fiancée and I bought a house. We lived in an apartment for two years, and experimented with smart home stuff, but wanted to do a bit more with our house. We’ve had enough people ask about our setup that I figured I’d write a blog post.