Adaptive Lighting is a custom component for Home Assistant that automatically adjusts the brightness and color temperature of smart lights based on the sun's position throughout the day. The component is designed to support the user's natural circadian rhythm by providing cooler color temperatures during midday hours and gradually transitioning to warmer tones at sunrise and sunset. The project is written in Python and distributed through HACS, the Home Assistant Community Store, making installation straightforward for Home Assistant users.
The core functionality intercepts light turn-on service calls and applies adaptive settings based on solar position, then continues to adjust lighting at regular intervals throughout the day. The component provides four primary switches for control: a main switch to enable or disable Adaptive Lighting, a sleep mode switch for nighttime settings, a brightness adaptation toggle, and a color adaptation toggle. Sleep mode sets lights to minimal brightness with very warm color temperatures, designed specifically for winding down before bed. The component also includes a web-based simulator tool that allows users to visualize how their lighting settings will behave throughout the day.
Manual control detection is a key feature of Adaptive Lighting. When users or external automations manually change light settings, the component detects this and marks the light as manually controlled, preventing further automatic adjustments until the light is turned off and back on or explicitly reset. An optional detection mode can identify changes made outside of Home Assistant by comparing current light state to previously used settings. The component fires a manual control event that can trigger additional automations, enabling sophisticated home automation workflows.
The project maintains active development with significant community engagement. GitGenius tracking shows 167 issues and pull requests with a median response latency of zero hours and a mean response time of 45.7 hours, indicating responsive maintenance. The most frequently applied issue labels are need/triage with 151 occurrences, kind/feature with 120, and kind/bug with 81, showing a healthy balance between feature requests and bug reports. The primary contributors tracked by GitGenius are RubenKelevra with 142 events, basnijholt with 107 events, and th3w1zard1 with 97 events, demonstrating consistent collaborative development.
The component supports extensive configuration through both YAML and the Home Assistant frontend user interface, with identical option names across both methods. Configuration options control brightness modes, color temperature ranges, transition timing, and various behavioral parameters. The component includes comprehensive documentation covering configuration, available services, automation examples, troubleshooting guides, and light-specific issues. Additional resources include graphs showing sun position, color temperature curves, and brightness ramps, helping users understand and optimize their lighting setup.
Adaptive Lighting is classified across multiple smart home domains including lighting control, adaptive brightness, circadian rhythm support, dynamic lighting, energy efficiency, and environmental sensing. The project connects with other major repositories through overlapping contributors, including home-assistant/core, microsoft/vscode, and ladybirdbrowser/ladybird, indicating involvement from developers working across multiple open-source ecosystems. The component supports various light types and protocols including Hue, Zigbee, and Z-Wave devices, making it compatible with most modern smart home lighting systems.
