Hey everyone! I wanted to share my recent experience setting up some smart lighting in my home. It’s been a fun project, and I’ve learned a few things along the way that I thought I’d share with the community.
First off, I recently installed a couple of VELUX skylights with their active bridge. The setup process was pretty smooth, but I did run into a bit of a snag when trying to integrate them with Home Assistant. Initially, I couldn’t get the bridge to show up in the integrations section. After some digging, I found that I needed to create an empty homekit_controller-entity-map file in the storage directory. Once I did that, the bridge showed up, but I still couldn’t get it to connect to the skylights. Turns out, I needed to ensure that the bridge was properly paired with the skylights using the VELUX app before trying to integrate it with Home Assistant. A little trial and error, but it’s working perfectly now!
On another note, I’ve been using Osram Lightify bulbs for a while now, and I’ve noticed that they sometimes turn on randomly, especially at night. It’s a bit annoying, but I’ve found a workaround using CoRE to automatically turn them off if they activate during certain hours. Here’s the basic gist of what I did:
IF the time is between 12:00 AM and 6:00 AM AND the light turns on THEN turn off the light.
It’s a simple solution, but it’s been effective so far. I’m curious if anyone has a more robust way of handling this issue, maybe something that can differentiate between user-initiated and automated requests. Any tips would be appreciated!
Lastly, I wanted to mention the importance of keeping firmware up to date. I recently updated my Osram bulbs, and while it didn’t completely eliminate the random activation issue, it did improve overall performance and reliability. It’s a good reminder to regularly check for firmware updates for all your smart devices.
If anyone has any questions or tips about smart lighting setups or troubleshooting, feel free to share! I’d love to hear how others are tackling similar challenges.