Simple things unknown about my wife to the general public, is that she cannot sleep in the dark. This normally means that we need to have a night light in the bedroom which to my luck has always been on my side of the bed. This normally has been too bright for me and also the fact that we forget to turn it off at times.

With the new place, I thought I better make this prettier and fancier for her. As always I went on the hunt for some LED light strips that I could attach under the bed and yet have it controlled via the smart echo system.  Found this little beauty, which came with a MagicHome app which had some integrations. 

The trick was that at sunset this light should come on and on sunrise automatically turn off. That was one need. The other was that when “night mode” kicks in, I want the light to be only at 5% of its original brightness so that it does not bother me. So this is how I made it happen.

I came across this lovely gem of a website called IFTTT in which I could configure rules, based on simple logic such as IF this happens THEN do that. I connected the LED strip light to the site along with the weather network, and made the simple rules:

  • If sunset, turn on the light, set it to blue and brightness to 75%
  • If sunrise turn the light off

This enabled the sunrise and sunset to work as I liked but what to do about when the house goes into night mode? Luckily for me while talking to the parents and Elma they wanted more… Which was:

  • All lights needed to be turned off
  • Dad wanted his music in his bedroom in low volume
  • Elma wanted spa music in the bedroom
  • I wanted the night light LED strip to be dim

I found out the Google Home app allows me to create routines and that made me create the following commands to run every time I say “Hey Google, Good Night”

Ahh the perks of routines and automations – things will now just happen and I don’t have to worry about anything, and we all get what we want.