FLARE
Flexible Lighting Automation & Reconciliation Engine.
Lighting for Home Assistant that follows the shape of your day. By default it's bright and cool to help you wake
up, warms through the afternoon, dims as evening comes, and sits low and warm once the house is asleep — and
every one of those is yours to change.
Rooms light up as people come in and go dark once they've left, or dim to a nightlight instead of going out.
Hand a room to a scene and FLARE fills in whatever the scene doesn't cover, and a light you change yourself is
left alone until the room next goes dark. Each room can also have a light of its own for Siri, Alexa or Google,
so "turn on the kitchen" brings the kitchen up the way FLARE would.
The quickest way to see what this actually does is the
interactive curve playground: move the schedule and
curve settings around and watch the day's lighting change.
- Quickstart — installing FLARE and setting up your rooms
- Dashboard — the ready-made dashboard, and its views for a dashboard of your own
- Guides — examples, templates, scenes, voice assistants and HomeKit, and building your own automations
- Reference — every blueprint input, schedule and flare entity, override protection, and service
- Contributing — repository layout and the test suite
Why four phases, not a continuous curve
Most adaptive lighting follows the sun's position. That means evening lighting at 4pm in winter, and bright
light until 9pm in summer, whatever time you actually get up and go to bed.
FLARE works from your schedule instead, using four named phases. With the default settings they work like this:
- Morning is there to help you wake up. It starts at a fixed time, not at sunrise, because work and school
don't start at sunrise either. Bright, cool-white light in the morning
wakes you up better, and there is some research to back that up.
Mostly, though, very cool light is just enough eyeball caffeine to get you as far as the coffee machine.
- Day is the long middle stretch, gradually warming as it runs toward evening so the eventual transition
doesn't feel abrupt.
- Evening is when relaxed, warm lighting takes over. It's the one phase that follows the sun, starting at
sunset, but no earlier and no later than limits you set: a 4pm winter sunset doesn't start the evening while
you're still at work, and a 10pm midsummer sunset doesn't mean evening never arrives.
- Night isn't tied to any solar event at all — it's just what the house should look like once everyone's
asleep: dim and warm, the lighting you want on at 3am without waking yourself up further.
How it fits together
Install FLARE from HACS and add it: it sets each room up with an automation from its blueprint. The blueprint covers
what most rooms want; if it doesn't do what you need, everything it uses is an ordinary Home Assistant entity or
action, so you can change it or write your own — see the
examples.
Acknowledgements
AI disclosure
Written with Claude Code. Commits carry a
Co-Authored-By trailer where Claude wrote them.
License
MIT
