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.
