I've had some of the Hue bulbs for a year or so, and I definitely wouldn't go back.
I now see two distinct kinds of lighting: task and ambient. For task lighting, I still want fast manual control, for which dumb bulbs are fine. But for ambient lighting, I want it to be almost entirely automatic.
In the morning, my lights gradually come on, starting very dim and warm. In the middle of the day, they're bright and like daylight in color. In the evening, they slowly dim and shift toward red. They go out on their own about when I want to go to bed.
One good part is that I don't have to mess with lightswitches all the time. But the much more valuable part is that it helps me establish a strong diurnal body clock. I now wake up on time without an alarm, I get enough sleep, and my mood is more even.
One alternative would be to put the smarts in the switches, as early home automation had it. But my old wiring isn't compatible with that. And even if it were, that at best gets you brightness control, not color temperature control.
Wow, I did something similar with the Hue bulbs, but I just used the rules api on the bridge combined with the virtual 'sunlight sensor' (and really long transition times) to trigger the light shifts. Similar setup to yours in effect though.
Ah, cool. I think they added the rules API later, otherwise I could well have done that. That's in some ways better; last year when my router died, my lights stuck on.
For what it's worth, I avoided tying the lights to actual daylight hours. In winter I tend to get a bit gloomy, and so part of my goal was to make my brain think that it was never really winter. It seemed to help this winter, although it's hard to say for sure.
Pretty good. My first pass at this did a very similar thing where I had a script running on a raspi to change the lights. Completely fair point about wanting to extend the lights during the winter. They switch to evening mode way too early lately and I kind of wish the rules api allowed you to do date based conditionals. That said, I have to do exactly 0 maintenance on it since I got the rules configured, so overall its pretty solid.
Fab. If you're interested in collaborating, drop me a note. I wrote my current software in Scala as an experiment, but I'm unlikely to do future work in Scala. I've been meaning to rewrite sunrise in something else, and I'm open to suggestion.
I was skeptical of this, but voice control of my lights has turned out to be incredibly useful. I can turn on the main lights while I'm taking my shoes off, before I'm in reach of the switches. I can dim lights from the sofa while watching TV. I can turn off individual lights. It's nothing earth-shattering in terms of importance, but it's something that does make my life better.
I can see the use, but what confuses me is why there's so much emphasis on putting the smarts in the bulbs. It would make a lot more sense to me to use normal bulbs and put the smarts in the switches. I'm sure there are switches out there like that, it's just not what people talk about.
There are modules like this: http://aeotec.com/z-wave-in-wall-switches/170-micro-smart-ap... that work with hubs like wink or smarthings, but home electrical wiring isn't consistent, so the installation isn't like the 1-2-3 easy setup you get from something like Hue.
Others have chimed in on the ease of bulb installation VS ease of switch installation. One other point is that the most you can get from a remote switch-only installation is variance in brightness, no RGB control.
Eh, it's a little easier. With the switch, when the lighting bits die (less common with LEDs now, but it still happens) you don't have to toss all the expensive switch electronics.
