Outdoor Light Level

[C4 User]

What are some of the best devices/drivers to program off of the Outdoor Light Level?

Note that I already have the Tempest weather station and driver but after a year, my Tempest is not so reliable any longer. It might be the battery, I’m not sure, so I am looking for sometime more reliable.

I do have a DS2 if that has a Light Level parameter I can program against.

Thanks in advance.

[Control4Savant]

Control4 motion sensors have ambient light readings I used to program off of.. 

[booch]

I'm really in to adaptive lighting (have eight overall brightness 'modes' that activate programmatically). Have tried many methods of sensing outdoor/ambient light, e.g., Tempest, dedicated lux sensors, etc. and settled on a combination of timeclock/solar cycle and cloud cover info. (now from Tomorrow.io, previously NWS) to dynamically adjust the timing of transitions. Local sensors are great on a sunny day, but throw in clouds/changing conditions, severe weather, etc. and there's a lot of temporary variation, which wasn't very useful for me (i.e., I don't want to change my lighting for a 20m storm).

If your set on getting sensor data though, beyond the Tempest, Shelly's 'Door/Window 2' sensors measure lux, integrate well, are cheap, have long battery life and are surprisingly accurate. I literally left a few stuck outside on my house (under eaves) to collect data and they had no issue after a year, with something like 80% battery left. Other sensors I tried were more sensitive/industrial, but they required more creative solutions to power and hide, and the data ended up being functionally equivalent (after processing it for the use case).

I suspect a camera source (let alone the DS2'S poor one) would be a poor choice, as the brightness is all over the place based on clouds, cars, people/activity, etc. (and of course not optimally aimed). It'd be great if the ambient data from C4 lighting was more accessible, as I'd imagine effectively gathering and processing that info. (from hundreds of sources) could be useful, but unfortunately I haven't heard of anyone figuring out how to aggregate it.

[RAV]

6 hours ago, booch said:

I'm really in to adaptive lighting (have eight overall brightness 'modes' that activate programmatically). Have tried many methods of sensing outdoor/ambient light, e.g., Tempest, dedicated lux sensors, etc. and settled on a combination of timeclock/solar cycle and cloud cover info. (now from Tomorrow.io, previously NWS) to dynamically adjust the timing of transitions. Local sensors are great on a sunny day, but throw in clouds/changing conditions, severe weather, etc. and there's a lot of temporary variation, which wasn't very useful for me (i.e., I don't want to change my lighting for a 20m storm).

If your set on getting sensor data though, beyond the Tempest, Shelly's 'Door/Window 2' sensors measure lux, integrate well, are cheap, have long battery life and are surprisingly accurate. I literally left a few stuck outside on my house (under eaves) to collect data and they had no issue after a year, with something like 80% battery left. Other sensors I tried were more sensitive/industrial, but they required more creative solutions to power and hide, and the data ended up being functionally equivalent (after processing it for the use case).

I suspect a camera source (let alone the DS2'S poor one) would be a poor choice, as the brightness is all over the place based on clouds, cars, people/activity, etc. (and of course not optimally aimed). It'd be great if the ambient data from C4 lighting was more accessible, as I'd imagine effectively gathering and processing that info. (from hundreds of sources) could be useful, but unfortunately I haven't heard of anyone figuring out how to aggregate it.

Did you write your own driver to pull from Tomorrow.io?

[zaphod]

11 hours ago, booch said:

If your set on getting sensor data though, beyond the Tempest, Shelly's 'Door/Window 2' sensors measure lux, integrate well, are cheap, have long battery life and are surprisingly accurate. I literally left a few stuck outside on my house (under eaves) to collect data and they had no issue after a year, with something like 80% battery left. Other sensors I tried were more sensitive/industrial, but they required more creative solutions to power and hide, and the data ended up being functionally equivalent (after processing it for the use case).

How do you integrate these into C4 - the Chowmain Shelly driver?

[DanITman]

11 hours ago, booch said:

I'm really in to adaptive lighting (have eight overall brightness 'modes' that activate programmatically). Have tried many methods of sensing outdoor/ambient light, e.g., Tempest, dedicated lux sensors, etc. and settled on a combination of timeclock/solar cycle and cloud cover info. (now from Tomorrow.io, previously NWS) to dynamically adjust the timing of transitions. Local sensors are great on a sunny day, but throw in clouds/changing conditions, severe weather, etc. and there's a lot of temporary variation, which wasn't very useful for me (i.e., I don't want to change my lighting for a 20m storm).

If your set on getting sensor data though, beyond the Tempest, Shelly's 'Door/Window 2' sensors measure lux, integrate well, are cheap, have long battery life and are surprisingly accurate. I literally left a few stuck outside on my house (under eaves) to collect data and they had no issue after a year, with something like 80% battery left. Other sensors I tried were more sensitive/industrial, but they required more creative solutions to power and hide, and the data ended up being functionally equivalent (after processing it for the use case).

I suspect a camera source (let alone the DS2'S poor one) would be a poor choice, as the brightness is all over the place based on clouds, cars, people/activity, etc. (and of course not optimally aimed). It'd be great if the ambient data from C4 lighting was more accessible, as I'd imagine effectively gathering and processing that info. (from hundreds of sources) could be useful, but unfortunately I haven't heard of anyone figuring out how to aggregate it.

I have a new driver that calculates solar position that you might be interested in.  Looking for some testers. It calculates it right on the driver and doesn’t use an api. 

[neil12011]

1 hour ago, zaphod said:

How do you integrate these into C4 - the Chowmain Shelly driver?

I'd like to know this as well!

[ILoveControl]

21 hours ago, booch said:

I'm really in to adaptive lighting (have eight overall brightness 'modes' that activate programmatically). Have tried many methods of sensing outdoor/ambient light, e.g., Tempest, dedicated lux sensors, etc. and settled on a combination of timeclock/solar cycle and cloud cover info. (now from Tomorrow.io, previously NWS) to dynamically adjust the timing of transitions. Local sensors are great on a sunny day, but throw in clouds/changing conditions, severe weather, etc. and there's a lot of temporary variation, which wasn't very useful for me (i.e., I don't want to change my lighting for a 20m storm).

If your set on getting sensor data though, beyond the Tempest, Shelly's 'Door/Window 2' sensors measure lux, integrate well, are cheap, have long battery life and are surprisingly accurate. I literally left a few stuck outside on my house (under eaves) to collect data and they had no issue after a year, with something like 80% battery left. Other sensors I tried were more sensitive/industrial, but they required more creative solutions to power and hide, and the data ended up being functionally equivalent (after processing it for the use case).

I suspect a camera source (let alone the DS2'S poor one) would be a poor choice, as the brightness is all over the place based on clouds, cars, people/activity, etc. (and of course not optimally aimed). It'd be great if the ambient data from C4 lighting was more accessible, as I'd imagine effectively gathering and processing that info. (from hundreds of sources) could be useful, but unfortunately I haven't heard of anyone figuring out how to aggregate it.

Man love this level of detail thank you! - I was thinking the same to control my inside / outside lighting but just havent found something that works well thank you for the post.

[ILoveControl]

10 hours ago, DanITman said:

I have a new driver that calculates solar position that you might be interested in.  Looking for some testers. It calculates it right on the driver and doesn’t use an api. 

@DanITman - I all for testing! like the fact its on Solar Position 

[Control4Savant]

I actually still have a Card Access (C4) ceiling mount motion sensor thats new in box. These are what I had in all of my rooms at home. My whole C4 house lighting was adaptive to ambient light. 

[C4 User]

@booch thank you for the complete description above, very intriguing approach. Any chance you can elaborate on how you are bringing the cloud data from Tomorrow.io into C4 for programming.

@DanITman any chance you would be able and desire to add Cloud Cover data to your driver?

 

[DanITman]

4 hours ago, C4 User said:

@booch thank you for the complete description above, very intriguing approach. Any chance you can elaborate on how you are bringing the cloud data from Tomorrow.io into C4 for programming.

@DanITman any chance you would be able and desire to add Cloud Cover data to your driver?

 

My driver works in programming so I would check a specific weather driver to do a cloud conditional check. My driver works anywhere in the world and having an API call to some global weather service would be tough. 

[booch]

On 11/1/2023 at 4:49 PM, RAV said:

Did you write your own driver to pull from Tomorrow.io?

Initially I used Node-RED and the Generic TCP Command driver but switched to one a forum member posted (below) and it works great.

 

[booch]

On 11/1/2023 at 9:01 PM, zaphod said:

How do you integrate these into C4 - the Chowmain Shelly driver?

Yes -- the Shelly driver brings lux value directly into variables.

If you want to use the data well though IMO, manipulation becomes necessary. Using the Variable Manipulator (math) driver and pre-massaging the data in Node-RED both worked for me when I was using it as a data source. (No longer per the above.)

[booch]

On 11/1/2023 at 9:26 PM, DanITman said:

I have a new driver that calculates solar position that you might be interested in.  Looking for some testers. It calculates it right on the driver and doesn’t use an api. 

I'd be happy to play with it -- please PM/link me.

[booch]

On 11/1/2023 at 10:45 PM, neil12011 said:

I'd like to know this as well!

Replied below -- sorry -- took a forum break, ha!

[booch]

On 11/2/2023 at 7:34 AM, ILoveControl said:

Man love this level of detail thank you! - I was thinking the same to control my inside / outside lighting but just havent found something that works well thank you for the post.

Your welcome. Here's a bit more detail (below) on how it works, if helpful. And happy to answer questions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[booch]

On 11/2/2023 at 11:36 AM, C4 User said:

@booch thank you for the complete description above, very intriguing approach. Any chance you can elaborate on how you are bringing the cloud data from Tomorrow.io into C4 for programming.

@DanITman any chance you would be able and desire to add Cloud Cover data to your driver?

 

Check the link I posted below to the driver I found on this forum for Tomorrow.io.

My old way was just to use Node-RED and Generic TCP Command. Basically, I wrote a script that hit Weather.gov's API every few seconds, parsed the cloud cover value at my location and sent one of five HTTP commands to C4 which flipped (5) variables for cloud cover in 20% increments.

[szz743]

I'm using Homematic-IP light sensor to detect light levels and report them into C4 via HTTP, there is a variable in C4 that always keeps the current light level in lux I believe.

But this might not be an easiest solution, I've got both C4 and Homematic-IP because Homematic is much better at controlling the heating systems .

 

[szz743]

I'm using Homematic-IP light sensor to detect light levels and report them into C4 via HTTP, there is a variable in C4 that always keeps the current light level in lux I believe.

But this might not be an easiest solution, I've got both C4 and Homematic-IP because Homematic is much better at controlling the heating systems .