ADAPTIVE DAY CYCLE / HOME ASSISTANT
A day that follows
the sun,
not the clock.
Six phases. One day. In step with the seasons, the weather and where you live.
A DAY THAT MAKES SENSE
One phase your automations can rely on.
Adaptive Day Cycle is a Home Assistant integration that divides your day into six phases: night, dawn, morning, afternoon, dusk and evening. Their start times shift with the seasons, the weather and where you live.
A fixed schedule drifts out of step with the light. This doesn’t.
01
Anchored to the sun.
Phase boundaries are calculated from your local sunrise, solar noon and sunset.
02
Seasonally aware.
Mornings start earlier and evenings come later in summer, and the reverse in winter. The effect scales with your latitude, so it matters in northern Europe and barely registers near the equator.
03
Weather-aware.
Pick a weather entity and overcast, rainy or stormy days bring the darker phases a little earlier.
04
You set the guard rails.
Dawn starts at a time you choose, and night starts when you say it does.
WHAT YOU GET
The right moment to do something.
A Day Phase sensor shows the current phase. A start-time sensor for each phase—dawn, morning, afternoon, dusk, evening and night—lets you build automations or dashboards around them.
Dim lights as dusk arrives, open blinds at dawn, switch scenes in the evening, or trigger anything else that should follow the day as you experience it.
INSTALL WITH HACS
A few steps.
Then make it yours.
You’ll need Home Assistant 2025.1.0 or newer and HACS installed.
New to HACS? Start with the HACS installation guide ↗, then return here.
CUSTOM REPOSITORY URL
https://github.com/aengeln/homeassistant-adaptive-daycycle
Repository type: Integration
- Add the custom repository.
Open HACS in Home Assistant. Select the three-dot menu → Custom repositories. Paste the URL shown here, choose Integration as the type, and select Add. - Download Adaptive Day Cycle.
Find it in HACS, open its entry and select Download. Confirm the download when prompted. - Restart Home Assistant.
Restart after the download so Home Assistant can load the integration. - Add the integration.
Go to Settings → Devices & services → Add integration. Search for Adaptive Day Cycle and select it. - Configure it for your home.
Your location defaults to Home Assistant’s location. Choose your dawn and night times, and optionally a weather entity. You can change these later from Configure.
BEHIND THE PROJECT
How I over-engineered the time of day.
It started with wanting the right lights at the right time. Then came the weather, the seasons, and the other side of the world.