Hi
iI am trying to do a simple thing: start the lights when outside visibilty is below a certain threshold. I don’t have any weather station nor light sensor. I was thinking of using weather report to trigger an automation based on visibility report but i am not able to fing any one working. What would you suggest?
Try using sunset?
Visibility as in amount of light or fog/smog?
As an amount of light.
I already use sunset, but some days it is dark and need the light longer than sunny days.
There are several sensors that measure lux. Search the site for “lux sensors”.
Aeotec Multisensor 6
I’ve got one of these controlling my lighting automation, and with the DTH written by @erocm1231 for this sensor, I have it reporting lux every 1 minute (instead of a minimum of 8 minutes as offered by the standard DTH provided by Samsung). You must have the sensor on a wired supply for such frequent updating.
This has been working perfectly for the 18mths I have been using it and brings different lights on at different lux levels to suit my needs.
Thanks
but what i am trying to achieve is to not use a sensor. I want to use the available information form weather forecast to trigger the action.
doesn’t seem simple. IMO visibility is fuzzy.
I think you have at least a couple virtual sensor/data sources in ST, but I have not used them for lux/light/visibility in automation, just for reference:
ST/ custom-device-type/ Accuweather Device Device AccuWeather/ [cloudCover] - you’d have to code your own calculation of visibility with time of day, cloudCover and whatever else you could scrape.
ST/ custom-device-type/ Outside-v1 Type SmartWeather Station Tile/ [illuminance] range 0/10000 calculated from time of day and apparent weather .
Not sure if either service will last but it one of the best features of ST customizable service . Hope the decision-makers don’t nuke what makes ST special, like this stuff.