Sunevent node to light lamp

[pabz]

Hi,

I've been tinkering with HA and Node-Red for a few days now and I want to make the garden lights and the porch light turn on and off based on a sunevent (node-red-contrib-sunevents (node) - Node-RED).

What I want is for the light to turn on at the sunevent dusk. As far as I know, a light needs the payload "on" to turn on. So based on this assumption, I have built the flow.

Below is an example of the flow as I have solved it myself, but I wonder if it can be done more easily.

The flow has 2 inject nodes so that the sunevent node is triggered every day (as advised in the documentation). Then a GPS location is pushed into the sunevent node. The sunevent node has a payload object with 4 properties: msg.payload.latitude, msg.payload.longitude, msg.payload.sunevent, and msg.payload.datetime. Since I am only interested in msg.payload.sunevent, I first remove the other 3 in a change node. Then the stripped payload goes to a JSON node to convert it into a string, then another change node to convert the string "sunevent":"dusk" to "on".

Is there perhaps an easier way to do this? Probably with function nodes, but I can't really code :9. By the way, the sunevent node keeps posting this at every sunevent and then passes it unchanged to the switch node as a text string instead of "on" because it is not converted if the string is anything other than "sunevent":"dusk". I haven't tested what effect that has on a light, for example.

Tips are welcome!

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[Steve-Mcl]

@pabz

Tips are welcome

Install node-red-contrib-cron-plus. Enter your map coordinates. Choose your sun events (dusk, dawn, whatever) and it will output when it happens. No need to inject. No need to check. Simple.

[pabz]

thanks! Will def look into it. And what about my chain of thought like I described? Did it make sense? Just trying to learn

[dynamicdave]

I use the Big-Timer node to control my home lighting system and Cron-Plus to control my home surveillance system. Big-Timer is probably a bit of an "over-kill" for this application but was the first node I found many, many years ago when I created the flow and dashboard.

This part of the flow provides feedback to indicate when a light has reacted to its command.

As I wanted my home lighting system to work "unattended" in "auto" and "manual" mode, I ended-up building a Finite State Machine (FSM) to manage and control the various states. The lights come on at Sunset and go off at 22:00hrs. At 22:00hrs until sunrise the home surveillance system takes over monitoring my infrared detectors and sending messages to a Telegram account on my mobile phone if body-heat is detected. I use a number of S20 and S26 Mains Switches flashed with Tasmota to turn the external lights On/Off.

I can't publish the flow just now as it is huge and contains a number of embedded security features applicable to my house and property.
If I get some spare time at Xmas I'll try to simplify it and publish it on... Share Your Projects.

[TotallyInformation]

I don't have too many lights to control so after some years of using a more complex scalable setup I went back to basics and have a small flow for each lamp:

CRON+ is used for the timed brightness setting but use the sun position nodes to output standard data to MQTT:

So I can have settings that change lighting when the sun is at a specific azimuth/elevation if I want (though I don't actually bother).

Instead, I use the daylight and sleep booleans as you can see.

Some of the lamps do use solar events though:

I really should rationalise things a bit more. But it all works so there isn't much incentive. It has simply grown and evolved over time.

[bakman2]

Another angle/approach - I have true adaptive lighting based on a lux sensor that measures the lux outside (could be inside too ofcourse) and I map the incoming value to a range with a range node, between sunset-60 (ie starting 60 mins before sunset) and have a long transition of 2 minutes.

This will slowly turn on the lights based on the outside brightness, the darker it gets, the brighter the lights.

eg. lux 400 - 0 will map to 0 - 60% brightness. Every time a new measurement comes back from the lux sensor the lights will change their brightness.