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Yo all, not sure if this is the correct thread for this but I'm not finding a specific "lighting" thread and this is a bit more specific than the general DIY sticky. If I've misfired, let me know. So, brief setup: I am going to redo the lighting in a house I have recently purchased, and I would like to replace the fixtures with some LED flush-mounts (or something of the sort). I want to be able to control the warmth of the light so that, for example, from 8pm-midnight, it is a warmer ~2500K, but from noon-4pm, it is at a more natural 5000K. Or whatever have you. The home has a LOT of natural light, so this would be a pretty huge upgrade to the overall ambiance of the house - not to mention the obvious stuff with making a healthy sleep/activity cycle an easier task and all that. Here's the kicker: I specifically want to AVOID using smart functionality controlled by apps if possible. I have personally worked on a few of those codebases, and bluntly they are all horrifying. Remote controls are acceptable if they allow me to set the timer and store the remote. The ideal would be some sort of simple mechanical timer - the same type we have all been using for 30 years to turn lights on and off. I am more than happy to DIY something up if that's what it takes. I'm plenty handy with pliers and a screwdriver. The closest thing I have found to acceptable in terms of modularity and functionality is Lowe's Project Source lights. They are strong, simple, no nonsense. The issue I have is that the warmth selector is a hard switch. It is soldered onto the circuit board and provides no real way to work a timer into it. Coolguye fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Apr 7, 2024 |
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Apr 7, 2024 19:57
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yeah it's not just that, i'm also considering house resale. i intend to live in this house for a while yet, but i do not intend to die there so i can reasonably expect i'm gonna sell it eventually. the concept of trying to turn over loving app access to the buyer so they can mess with the lights just fills me with utter revulsion.
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Apr 7, 2024 20:06
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H110Hawk posted:You could probably crack it open and solder leads onto the switch contacts. From there you can use whatever you want. You should meter it out though because that's only OK if it's on the low voltage / DC side of the equation. If it's somehow on the mains side then that's a non-starter. assuming this is low voltage enough to accomplish something like that, do you have a specific source for parts or whatever that i might be able to look into? i'm not opposed to just DIYing this poo poo but i'm out of my depth when it comes to getting the correct parts to slap together. H110Hawk posted:Go on... the fundamental fact is that there's absolute shitloads of sensitive and personally identifiable information being trucked around by these smart devices and none of it is treated as such. like you may have seen the reports a couple years ago now about how Amazon Alexa happily records every time it THINKS it MIGHT have heard its name? every single thing it records gets beamed back to the mothership, and none of it is encrypted at all. it's the same deal with your wifi lights, your wifi dishwasher, your wifi buttplug, etc. companies tend to collect data about what they think they MIGHT need in the future, rather than what they know for a fact they need right now, just so they can avoid asking for more permissions from app stores or scaring people with a privacy policy update. encryption is a needless cost center so nobody bothers doing it. even logging in is considered little different than logging into SA. suspicious logins from nowhereistan? who cares! 2FA? what's that?! then obviously the devices themselves are more than delighted to promiscuously leak whatever wifi/etc creds they've been given. both ends of the devices are about as effectively secured as a pierced condom. whether or not this is something a person cares about depends on the person. legitimately, you would have to be awfully unlucky or awfully targeted to have a data provider breach compromise your routine and specifics into the hands of someone who had the motive and means to do something with it. meanwhile, you're enjoying the slick automated glory of your jetsons house on every day that DOES NOT happen. but like a few other posters are kind of alluding to, the big problem with security and footprint isn't the adversary you can imagine, it's the adversary who didn't even know they were an adversary until some critical piece fell into place. not even they knew what their plans were until the opportunity arose, so how could you possibly anticipate and counter them? just for me personally, i value the certainty of Cannot. Motronic posted:So as a network engineer by training, this is me. I have rules for my "smart" devices: they do not touch the internet (everything on a seperate VLAN and wifi network), lights must be able to be manually controlled (read: real switches on the wall still), loss of the controller must result in nothing other than loss of automation/timers/data logging/alerting. I'm using Home Assistant for this. I do have one nic in a limited access vlan so it can get to the internet through pinholes to get things like the weather to disply on my kindle fire tablets that dispplay HA "panels" (which absolutely do not touch the internet). *: just so people do not fear i am going to go Full Groverhaus on this, i have an unfinished basement and my fiberoptic internet comes in there. i'm just going to plug in their router, run the uplink to your standard network switch, and then staple network cable to the joists until i get to each room of the house. at that point i drill through the floor just enough to slap an RJ-45 outlet down into the actual floor to service the room. sure it won't be in the wall like a "normal" outlet but also i can do all this myself, safely, and if someone wants to unscrew and slap down a pirate treasure chest there or something, that's both easy to do and their business. Coolguye fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Apr 8, 2024 |
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Apr 8, 2024 01:02
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Kasan posted:Mains is the AC side of the circuit. Everything before the transformer where it hooks into the house wiring. Everything after(edit: the rectifier. not the transformer. A rectifier is where the AC becomes DC) that is DC and usually pretty easy to tinker with as long as you don't have to worry about IC chips. Changing a switch to a mechanical dimmer (and timer probably) is pretty easy since you'd essentially be changing the switch to a potentiometer. You would control everything with something as simple as an arduino. how would i go about determining this? again, apologies but i am v dumb when it comes to these topics. this feels like something i should know about my own house, though.
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Apr 8, 2024 02:13
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very neat! i'm definitely comfortable enough to rig up an arduino for something like that. the lowes light i disassembled to get a look at its guts had basically no real wires on it, so my presumption would be that these are pretty low-load wires i'm working with. that said, i am not sure what voltages i would be working with to mess with the WARMTH of these lights versus the basic bright/dimness, which is a separate matter. i'm genuinely not certain how one is set vs another. there's no inherent dimmer switches in this house, but since the house itself was built in 2009 as some old woman's forever-home i strongly suspect the electrical systems can support me swapping out the basic toggle switches with something like this noise. when i investigated this with the rather dumb lowes LED light i bought to play with, the dimmer functionality was just that, i could get a lot less luminosity out of it but i couldn't mess with the color.
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Apr 8, 2024 04:36
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suits me. at the end of the day if this is truly intractable i can still buy some dumb lowe's lights, set them individually at 2500k for my bedroom and 5000k for my office and living room, wipe my hands and call it a day. that is ALWAYS an option here. i'd really rather not do that since i think setting the warmth on a timer would genuinely be a healthier environment. doubly so since the house really does have a shitton of windows and tons of natural light. but i'm not married to the idea. i guess i'll wait to hear what motronic's solution would be with a roll-your-own smart solution and Home Assistant. i'm a computer toucher by training so that's potentially way more up my alley.
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Apr 8, 2024 05:37
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shame on an IGA posted:If you're serious about heavy DIY it's quite possible to tap those switch contacts to a single controller that can modify them on a program, if you really want something independent of cloud architecture a Siemens Logo would give you some timers and 4 relay outputs, should be quite adequate at the ~100 USD price point can i bother you to link one of these products because googling "siemens logo" doesn't return a purchaseable product for what i feel are pretty understandable reasons per hawk's suggestion i'm prly gonna shy away from something that requires me to know a lot about nature of the electrical currents i am working with, but if this is something i'm able to set and forget then i'm perfectly happy to pay a bit extra per light. Coolguye fucked around with this message at 07:26 on Apr 8, 2024 |
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Apr 8, 2024 07:24
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Qwijib0 posted:On the complete insanity end of the spectrum if you're going to be running low voltage to a bunch of switchable fixtures you could use DMX controlled CCT ones and then a dmx to Ethernet bridge to manage the color temperatures, letting you do smooth fades and default brightnesses at each time of the day The main thing I got out of this was that X was gon give it to me
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Apr 8, 2024 15:45
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yippee cahier posted:I’d just go with ESPHome based custom firmware flashed to commodity lights. They won’t call home at all. You don’t even have to use HA if you just want to use the web API from a cron job. 10 minutes reading the documentation makes it look like this is the real dove path here. if i'm reading this right, this basically is some web thing i would set up over a local network, probably some private/separate wifi thing, and i'd more or less address them as 192.168.1.x/light1. i'd have some shitbox or even a pi somewhere that acted as C&C to automatically run the commands to configure the lights at certain times of the day? that would be kind of ideal because in the short term i could simply install the lights to some basic standard position and set them to look for a wireless network i'd set up later, so i can finish configurations or what have you at my leisure. this is still my first foray into something like this, though, do you have a suggestion for a specific light that you know would work for this approach? as a corollary, how are you identifying that it is workable so I can pick up searching for lights myself?
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Apr 9, 2024 20:14
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yippee cahier posted:I’m using Caseta dimmers without temperature control for my lights, so nothing I can directly recommend. I’m sure there’s a home automation thread or esphome reddit sub where they can give a heads up about sales on easy to flash lights. After doing a bit of googling, it does look like it’s a bit annoying to try to locate compatible ones and flash them (if you’re not into electronics), so hopefully I didn’t get your hopes up for nothing. If you’re ok with zigbee, Ikea bulbs are standard and can be used without their hub. I did ask on the r/homeautomation subreddit and they were uniformly useless. Afaict if you're unwilling to use google home or alexa about 95% of the sub is straight out. At this point I've basically resolved to just use Home Assistant and I've been using their forums to guide purchasing decisions. I bought a Home Assistant Green after messing with an install on a lovely computer. Then, through the HA forums I found some lights that people were able to finagle into working for <$1 apiece as long as you bought a pack of 20 from the wholesaler. So I've plunked down a couple bucks on all that and I'm pretty sure I can get what I want going that way. I'll be back for a trip report one way or another. Methylethylaldehyde posted:Doing the networking properly via the wall is trivial. I've basically resolved to bring him over one of these weekends so we can experiment with the process using he RJ-11 jack in the master bedroom. I figure worst case scenario I break the RJ-11 jack. Who gives a gently caress.
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Apr 14, 2024 08:14
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Motronic posted:Phone wiring is typically daisy chained around a house from jack to jack. Ethernet needs to be home runs. There's little that phone jacks are likely to "help" other than already having a hole in the wall - potentially with a low volt ring but even more likely with a full bax that's going to to be in the way. the hole in the wall (and the baseboards) is really the only thing i'm hoping to get out of them so that's basically right in my mind. really the overall goal of the initial exploration is to pop off the RJ-11 jack and see if there are existing holes down to the first floor that we could use. in an ideal world it already goes downstairs somehow and we just throw an ethernet cable right alongside the telephone cable. in a terrible one i gently caress everything up and somehow break either the RJ-11 outlet or the telephone cable, at which point i quietly replace the faceplate and never speak of it again. i never intend to use a land-line telephone and most likely whoever buys the house from me won't either because even as forgotten and obsolete technology it still manages to engender more harassment and interruptions than cell phones. so on the whole there's relatively little to lose. just to be clear in the case where i do use the same holes, i would be running plain old gigabit ethernet cable/cat6. i'd just feed it the extra 3 feet to one side so i could make an entirely new outlet near the telephone jack. all this is assuming a LOT of course so how far i go with this plan depends on what i see when i peer past the RJ-11 jack; if it looks awful there's definitely always the option of replacing the faceplate without really touching anything. Coolguye fucked around with this message at 16:32 on Apr 14, 2024 |
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Apr 14, 2024 16:28
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