Tutorial: Build a custom Wake-Up Machine
You can certainly do this with a virtual switch or with cloud services. The scene switcher is local, simplifies the routines and makes it cleaner and easier to test.
The idea is having a few scenes from the lowest brightness you can get, which in lights like my WiZ means using a red-ish colour at 1% (actually 10% because that’s WiZ minimum) and then ramp-up until a 100% cool white or another colour that gives you energy to start the day.
The Switcher settings for a Wake-Up sequence lasting 15 minutes:
- Number of scenes: 15 (does not mean 15 routines)
- Cycle mode: Linear
- Auto-cycle section: Starting scene: Initial
- Long Spanning section: Switching delay (minutes): 1
For testing let it stay in 0 minutes, we don’t want to wait 15 minutes to test the sequence each time if we can do it in 15 seconds.
The routines
- Map the switcher active scene to actions. No need to create 15, that’s just an easy way to know that, if the whole routine lasts 15 minutes, the scene number matches the minute so you can create actions for scene 1, 3, 5, 10 and 15 for instance with gentler changes at the beginning and more steep at the end if you haven’t woken up.
Scheduling the wake-up
- To start the wake-up machine, schedule the “Auto-cycle [ > ]” action. For testing you can use the dashboard button, configure the Dashboard button action as “Smart Auto-cycle [ > / Stop ]” or as Looping Next to go one by one.
It will automatically finish in the last scene unless you run the “Auto-cycle [ STOP ]” action. I have a routine that calls it when the light Turns Off so that’s my way of stopping the wake-up cycling if I don’t want it to continue.