I'm trying to cycle through 4 different lights from sunset to sunrise.
I'm sure there is a better/cleaner approach to this, looking for someone to point me in the right direction.
I think you need to give a bit more detail. Just took a quick look at your flow... are you trying to turn just one of the four lights on for 5 seconds every hour in a sequence, or ALL the lights on together??
Last question... what are the name of the nodes shown in your flow??
Sorry I'm not familiar with Home Assistant - but I'm sure someone else will jump in to help.
Just thinking off the top of my head... I would do something like using BigTimer or Cron-Plus to determine the period between sunset and sunrise and use this fact to set a variable to act as a 'gate'. Then trigger a counter every hour that counts 0,1,2,3 and resets. Then decode the value of the counter to determine which light to operate.
I'm busy at the moment, but as soon as I get some spare time I'll cobble a flow together.
Can I ask what is the purpose of this flow? Are the lights embedded in some kind of display? Also should the sequence cycle all day until the sun is below_horizon?
There are 4 lights in my patio, which I want them on from sunset to sunrise. Didnt need all 4 to be on as it would be too bright, so came up with the idea of cycling through them to keep the usage of them equal.
Are they on dimmer control or just a binary relay (on/off)?
They are on a binary relay - On/Off
Just had a few spare minutes to knock-up a flow for you to try. You will need to edit the function nodes so the flow 'talks' to Home Assistant and enter your Lat/Lon values so sunset/sunrise are correct for your locality. It's not the most efficient flow as I wrote it so it would be easy to understand what's going on.
four_lights.json (11.2 KB)
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It's amazing what a few hours sleep will do to refresh the brain!!
The previous flow had some shortcomings which I think are addressed by this new and improved version.
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In the original flow the lights would change every hour - which is what you wanted. The shortcoming was it could take up-to an hour for a light to go off after sunrise - not very nice.
In this version I'm using the 1-minute output from BigTimer to act as a sort of 'system clock'. This is used by the four decode nodes so they perform a check every minute, which means it would only take a minute after sunrise to turn the lights off - neat eh? Also saves electricity, money and the planet.
The other improvement is all lights are forced OFF when the Timer is "off". I think in the original version there may have been a chance that a light remained "on" at sunrise.
You will need to do some tests and see if there are any edge-cases I've missed. I suggest you set the Inject node, below BigTimer, to repeat every 2-minutes during your initial tests.
