Nice breakdown Chris. I'm excited about this feature. I have a few accent lights that I keep on pretty much all the time so it's great to be able to have them automatically change to the proper temperatures based on the time of day. I look forward to seeing if/how they expand upon this in the future. Thanks for this video!
It’s funny how I just started digging into Shortcuts at the EXACT right moment to have the skills to do this video! :) Totally with you - There are a few lights that I definitely want to keep at the same brightness but I’d love to have follow-the-sun temperature on the lights. It’s definitely a great first step. Not taking out my LIFX lights anytime soon though. :)
What a great breakdown! I would love to see if you could set your own 'sunrise' and 'sunset' times to match when you are trying to target bedtimes. Bummer to see the the brightness doesn't shift at all. Great video.
Hey Josh! Definitely something I’m trying to figure out but no obvious way to get a fade in/out that I’ve been able to get it working yet. Shortcuts doesn’t seem to have the ability to directly change the brightness of a Homekit bulb to a specific value. Instead it just lets you change the bulb to a specific scene or pre-determined setting. Have to keep looking... :)
LOL Totally agree. I dont’ see this replacing my LIFX sunrise settings any time soon, but it’s going to be interesting to see if it might be enough to replace some of my older dumb bulbs to get the full circadian lighting happening in the commons spaces around the house. 100% brightness in the morning is wrong. Just wrong.
Good stuff. I love these steps Apple is taking to get our smart home to serve us. Great break down and deep dive in what we know now at this early stage. I can’t wait to see what’s next.
Hey MDT! We’re on the same page - Although it’s taken time and we want it all now - I think Apple’s slow-but-steady approach to the smarthome market is really going to pay off for them in the long run. My guess is Hue will be the next to release, but I’d love to be surprised! Looking forward to being able to compare some of the different implementations!
Glad you it was useful! There’s still so little info on how this is actually working on the inside. Definitely check out the Follow the Sun app if you want a better version of HomeKit compatible circadian lighting.
Hey Dustin! Definitely excited about the future here. From Apple’s perspective, I know they try really hard to give us a “it just works” feature, but I’m really looking forward to the time they give us a bit more control over the actual range of color temperatures.
Absolutely agree with you! I invested heavily in LIFX Tiles in the bedrooms as there Simulated Sunup is one of the best - especially for that format of light. I scheduled mine in LIFX and then never looked at it. I’m with you though that I would love this to be something I could just turn on in Homekit and have it work across vendors without having to pay a premium for any specific light. On the bright side ( see what I did there! ) Apple Adaptive lighting is the first step in what we’re looking for. Really hoping that they bring us gradual lighting soon!
I really like that it just changes the color temp, if it would change the brightness it would screw up my brightness automation! I want it to change brightness with scenarios not time of day!
Thanks for the comment Christian! I totally see how this could cause issues if you’ve already spent the time to figure out a good brightness routing. What are you doing for brightness throughout the day? This is still something I haven’t found a good solution for yet and I’d love to hear what you’ve got set up.
Basicslly I have 3 brightness scenarios I recall through a shortcut command according to the time of day, whenever you trigger the light (button or automation) you get the brightness that suits. You could also trigger a automation with “if” commands to get the lights to change brightness along time as you wnat but since it won’t animate nicely and We here at home shut on and off the light all the time it makes no sense to me...
Appreciate the reply! I’m looking more into shortcuts but not loving the amount of scenes I might have to create to get the proper balance. Even at a 25% brightness shift per room ( 4 scenes per room x number of rooms ) that seems like a lot of work. :P. Unfortunately, the convert to shortcut feature seems to only allow you to set a light to a specific scene or single setting - I’d love for the ability to create a variable and use it to modify the brightness using a repeat statement. Maybe iOS 15 I guess? :)
I have a LIFX Mini Dawn to Dusk smart light bulb that has this built in. You can set the color temperatures, the brightness, and when you want the colors to change. It also has a night light feature that can be turned on or off separately. It also has a feature that allows you to set different schedules for different days of the week. I have one for weekdays and another schedule for weekends when we want to sleep in. I am holding out hope that Apple HomeKit will copy this format. The only thing I don't like about the LIFX application is you can only set the schedules using exact times and cannot use actual Sunrise and Sunset times based on your location.
Hey Frederick, I’m a HUGE fan of the LIFX dusk/dawn implementation. IMO it’s the current gold standard for this feature in the industry. I’m with you in that I was really hoping that Apple would have given us something inspired by the LIFX feature. To be honest, I actually prefer the LIFX implementation without tracking to the location. Where I live, the sunrise/set times can vary pretty widely throughout the year, but my kids school time stays pretty much the same. It works out better for my family to have the LIFX lights turn on/off based on the programmed schedule rather than everyone getting up too early/late. :)
@@Homekitgeek I have a bunch of LIFX bulbs as well, and I'm certainly a fan of the company. The lamps are bright, the saturated colors are full, and a great app gives you granular control using standard lighting design language (such as CCT). One complaint I have about the LIFX implementation, however, is that the control is merely a timer. I want to be able to easily switch the lights on/off at the wall, with my voice, or with motion and/or geofencing. A timer is simply too limiting. Lutron/Ketra is the obvious thought leader in this segment of the industry, but the premium is significant... Have you found a way around that limitation?
@@JustinBoening In my case, the timer has been sufficient to hit what I'm looking for as most of the lights are controlled through automations, not switches. I do have a couple of rooms that I use with Apple HomeKit connected Hue switches to run on/off but given that my primary method of control is to let the sensors work, it's been enough. Totally agree that Lutron/Ketra has an amazing solution, but the premium has made it out of reach, not to mention that I'd then be giving up the color and dynamic effects as well. The obvious method of dealing with this may also be to use something like HomeAssistant or Node-Red to create a workflow to deal with the circadian lighting pattern you want. Lots of things to take into account though. Geolocation for Sunrise/sunset, any adjustments between bulb vendors or products to take into account variation in the LEDs, etc... could be a lot of tweaks to make this amazing. :) Not something I've felt strongly enough about as a problem to really dive down the rabbit hole to see if I can get a working solution that addresses all my wish-list.
@@Homekitgeek No doubt in my mind, dynamic natural light is the future of lighting in the built environment. It’s still early days though. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to get the experience you want, unless you’re willing to throw money at the problem and get a Lutron HomeWorks with Ketra system. One issue that remains unclear to me: are you able to toggle your Hue lights on and off with you Hue light switch and maintain the Apple Adaptive Lighting cycle? Or do you have to use a separate command from the app or voice? Or is it more like LIFX, which is just a timer?
Soooooo... trick question on the Hue piece. IF you use the Hue dimmers in full hue mode, then they will actually modify the settings on the bulbs, so it can turn off the adaptive lighting piece if it’s changing the hue/warmth of the light at the same time. If you are using the Hue dimmers in full homekit mode to trigger scenes, then you can control exactly what the button press is doing, including making sure that the bulbs stay in adaptive lighting mode. Adaptive lighting lights can have their brightness modified without changing whether or not they are in adaptive lighting mode. So if you use a homekit scene to modify the power state of a hue light from on to off, that won’t change the adaptive lighting setting when you turn it back on. As well, if you wanted to, you could also set the “on” scene to also kick on adaptive lighting on all supported bulbs. Personally, I haven’t gone through my Hue bulbs yet and made the adjustments to all the scenes in that most of my Hue bulbs are part of a Hue Play Sync HDMI box setup - so they are constantly changing their state based on whatever’s on the TV. No real benefit to have the Adaptive lighting running there. :)
Funny enough I was just thinking of doing a quick video on exactly that! I’ve had a few people ask in Twitter as well. I’ll add it to the list! I just started digging into shortcuts so it’s not pretty. But it’s useful :)
Great video! Have you done anymore testing on how it works? Does it adapt to sunset sunrise? Or is it just based on time of day? Installed it just yesterday, but I think it is based on time. The sun sets really early here in Sweden, and the light was ice cold a couple hours after sunset, and it was very dark outside.
My gut is telling me that it's a strict time schedule. It's also dark at 5pm here in Canada and the lights are still blue white. I'm setting up another test run to see if I can prove that, but right now it's just a guess. :) Will post back once I grab the data. I'm also impatiently waiting to see if I see the same results with the Philips Hue lighting system but I'm still waiting on the firmware update. :)
@@Homekitgeek It’s a bummer that it only works with time. I’ve had my philips lights on Adaptive Lighting for 2 whole days now, and I don’t like it at all! Let’s just hope Apple will let us adjust this a bit more in the future. You should also be able to set how cold or warm you want the lights.
Definitely agree. It’s not replacing my LIFX lights anytime soon. I do know of a couple of developers who are working on this “problem” though. I still have hope!
@@Homekitgeek that sounds great, but I’ll have to rely on Apple fixing this, all HomeKit and Philips in my home. I also enjoy being there at the beginning of something, always nice to see stuff evolve.
Great point and I was wondering the same thing. If the temp was being tracked in Kelvins i would have expected the same thing. The temperature here isn’t Kelvins but instead is in Apples Temperature scale which appears is opposite from the Kelvin scale. The Daya shows higher is warmer here.
LOL. I hear you. I even spent some some times looking around to see if there was a good way to convert between the values I pulled out of the LED strip and traditional Kelvins and the simple answer was “nope”. I didn’t go to far down the rabbit hole but far enough to understand that I’d have to have a lot more time and tools to map this out. It is what it is. :)
This is an it depends questions. If you’re not leaving your lights on full time right now and you start because of Adaptive lighting, it will likely increase your bill. On the other hand, if the lights are on all the time now, it will probably stay approx the same. Adaptive lighting doesn’t change the brightness of a bulb which is where most of the electrical draw comes from, at least in my limited testing. I’m not a electrical engineer so I will defer to anyone who’s got more knowledge in the subject. :)
I agree that the brightness piece is a bummer, but I wouldn’t say useless. The ability for the lights to turn on to the appropriate light temperature/hue/saturation based on the time of day means that we will be getting less blue light later in the day which equates to better sleep in general. It’s not what I wanted - but it’s a step in the right direction!
I’ll not agree that is useless if you don’t change the brightness. I did something similar but with home assistant. And basically what I am changing is the warm of the white, same brightness and I can see and feel the difference. And I corroborated this with my girlfriend which doesn’t know what is happening but she feel something going on for good
Great point. I think another way to say how I feel is that the adaptive lighting in its current form is useful for making sure that the proper light temperature is available throughout the day. But without brightness controls - it can’t address the sunrise/sunset settings which has caused me to invest in LIFX products heavily in my bedrooms. Apple can’t currently address this use-case. Hone Assistant could definitely do this as well. If Apple was to give us a fade feature where we specify two brightness levels and it automated the gradual steps between the two levels that would work perfectly with the adaptive lighting feature. Without the fade, it’s less useful than I was hoping.
