A “signal light” is what my Home Assistant smart home was missing all along
It can be difficult to transmit information throughout your smart home in an effective but subtle way. Mobile notifications work well for some things, but they can be easy to miss, and most of us receive too many anyway.
That’s why I started using a signal light instead.
What is a light signal?
A signal light is a light that changes color based on the states of entities or events occurring in your smart home. The light may come on and stay on, or it may come on for a short time and then turn off again. You can use a single light to indicate several different states by cycling through the colors.
My main use case is to indicate that the garage door is open, based on the status of my Wi-Fi controlled garage door opener. I have a reminder that triggers a notification on my phone after the door has been left open for five minutes, but it’s easy to miss in the sea of other notifications. A red light that is hard to ignore is a better choice.
I’ve been thinking about the best way to do this for a long time, but my proposed implementation was complicated. For some reason I was going to resort to an ESP32 powered device with custom LEDs. In fact, you can achieve this with any simple color changing light bulb.
In my case, I’m using the latest IKEA “Tradfri” stock that I was able to get hold of at my local store (since the company is moving to “Kajplats”, Matter over Thread Lights in the future).
You can use any color to indicate a state or event. My garage door notification currently turns on a red light in the living room, but you can add multiple traffic lights around your house and associate certain events with specific lights if you want.
Other ideas include a short-lived flash of color to indicate that someone has come home, a signal in the kitchen to indicate that a load of laundry is finished, a blue or orange light to let you know the air conditioning or heating is on, a green light to indicate that the solar panels are generating more electricity than you consume, whatever you want!
This custom integration makes things easier
After trying to use flashing light signals to indicate that the garage door is open with varying levels of success, I came across Signal Lights’ custom integration with Home Assistant. To use it, you will need to install the Home Assistant Community Store.
Go to the HACS tab and add Signal Lights GitHub as a custom repository by clicking the three-dot icon in the upper right corner of the screen. Choose “Custom repositories”, then paste https://github.com/prestomation/ha-signal-lights in the box, selecting “Integration” from the drop-down list and clicking “Add”.
Now search HACS for “Signal Lights” and click “Download”, then follow the instructions to add it. Finally, go to the Home Assistant “Settings” page and use the three-dot icon in the upper right corner to select “Restart Home Assistant” and confirm your choice.
Once Home Assistant restarts, go to Settings > Devices & Services and use the “+ Add Integration” button to search for traffic lights. You will need to “Submit” to create the necessary entities, after which you are good to go. You can now click “Signal Lights” in your integrations list to start setting things up.
Click the “cog” icon to enter setup. Here you can add lights (“Add Light”) and signals (“Add Signal”) as well as delete those you have already configured. You can also enable optional notifications and configure signal cycling (which cycles through different signals when multiple are activated on the same light).
Finalizing the process is quite simple. Define your lights first, then add signals. You can limit certain signals to specific lights, create one-off events that only light up for a set period of time, and add a map to your dashboard (using the “Add Map” button to search for “Traffic Lights”). You can even use traffic light actions in your automations by selecting them from the list.
Use dedicated lights for this
For this to work effectively, you need to use dedicated traffic lights in your home. At a basic level, you’ll know that if a light is on, it’s worth paying attention to (you probably won’t treat it like the other lights in your house and ignore it).
The other reason to do this is that the light will not return to its previous state once the Signal Lights event is over. So if you’re already using a light, the Signal Lights event will change color and turn it off when the signal ends, rather than returning it to its previous color and state. Having dedicated lights avoids this problem. This also allows you to get a little creative with the type of light you use.
Personally, I’ll invest in a fancy variety of “LED filament” like the Cync Clear Full Color Smart Bulb in a decorative lamp without a shade that will never be used in my living room. I also think the $30 Classic Fado Table Lamp from IKEA would be perfect for this on a hallway table or windowsill.
- Brand
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Cync.
- Integrations
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Matter, Alexa, Apple Home, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings
The Cync Clear Full Color Direct Connect A19 Smart Bulb is a clear version of Cync’s existing full color smart bulb, making it look much more like a traditional incandescent bulb. Able to be configured through Matter without using a specific companion app, Cync’s bulb is compatible with virtually any smart home ecosystem.
Looking for more ideas on how to manage notifications in your smart home? Check out these Home Assistant notification tips.
