All I want to do is automate my bedroom lights to fade out at my command. I have a truly amazing number of Phillips Hue lights (wondering why those didn’t get a shout out on the podcast) and so many Hue motion sensors. Love it when my bathroom, office, or laundry room lights turn on automatically as I walk in.
One thing that I have been fiddling around with literally for years has been a quick way to set my Hue lights to fade over a preset time (such as 15 minutes) after I give it a command. I have tried third party apps, such as iConnect, but they screwed up some other automations. Astonishingly, this is not a built in Hue light function. Hue lights does have a way to set a fade at a specific time, but that doesn’t work if your bedtime varies. A variable start fade is part of Hue labs, but it takes multiple taps and almost a minute every night to trigger it. Frankly, setting it tends to wake me up just at the time I want to go to sleep!
I have had original Flic buttons, and one worked sometimes, and then stopped working. It does not make me confident in no purchasing Flic 2, tbh.
Back to the original question, I have experimented with this for quite some time, and if anyone has a short and reliable way to trigger a fade tor Hue, I would love to hear it.
We covered them in the last episode on home automation! I did actually upgrade my white to white ambiance which I really like, but we ran out of time to talk about them 
Sadly I’m not sure of a way to do this without something powerful like Home Assistant to do the actual work. I should look into doing this with home assistant actually…
This episode inspired me to search for some Tuya appliances. Fortunately, I found an Australia retailer that sells rebranded Tuya products. I bought myself a Smart Air Purifier and (after a little bit of fiddling) managed to add it to the Tuya Smart app.
I’m now thinking of adding said device to HomeKit via the Homebridge plugin…and I’m not really sure how to do that.
Rosemary – could you point to somewhere I could find instructions on how to do that?
Great show!
Thanks, Rosemary! Must remember…ALWAYS Check the show notes!
Thanks for this week’s podcast - it came at a good time, because I too have a number of Hue lights, all of which are being controlled through the Apple Home app at the moment (and a couple of shortcuts).
This has always struck me as a bit of an inefficient way of doing this i.e. it’s aways easier/quicker just to turn the lights off at the wall, rather than pull my phone out and open the Home app or wait for Siri to process requests.
So I guess my question on all this is why are the ‘smart’ wall light switches better than the standard light switches you have? What’s the advantage of having them? Will they solve this inefficiency issue?
Thanks in advance!
- They stop people accidentally turning off the power to your smart bulbs, which may be being automatically or remotely controlled.
- they can often be set to trigger one or more programs/scenw/scenarios rather than just on/off/dim level.
Right after this episode I finally got 4 FYRTUR smart blinds from IKEA. Just put them up. They look and work great from the TRADFRI bridge and the IKEA home smart app. But on the home kit side only 3 blinds show up?! The one that doesn’t was the last one that I connected to the remote. I do know you can only have up to 4 blinds to one remote. Is there a similar limitation to home kit and you can only add 3 blinds?
Found the solution in Reddit. Unplug your network cable leading to the Gateway. Plug it back in. 4 blinds are now in my HomeKit.
Hi all…
Rosemary, could you let me know what the model is of the Mi light sensor you suggested please?
I bought GZCGQ01LM which I think is the correct one… I have some on order from AliExpress as you suggested still not arrived (3wks!) but being impatient I bought one from eBay (more expensive).
I just want to make sure I got the right model, also can I check if you added it to your M2 hub?
I had a few problems at first logged in, as soon as I set the M2 to ‘Homekit only mode’ it worked… does that sound right?
Thank you.