[App][Pro] Ephemerides

[HenriDO]

Ephemerides

Every twilight, golden hour and moon phase for your home, computed offline.

Ephemerides | Homey

Homey knows sunrise and sunset. That is two instants out of fourteen. Between “the sun is up” and “the sun is down” sit the three twilights, the golden hour and the blue hour, the moments that actually matter if you are driving shutters, outdoor lighting or a camera. This app computes all of them for the exact position of your home, along with where the sun and the moon are in the sky right now.

It makes no network call at all

Nothing is fetched. Every instant is computed on your Homey from its own coordinates, so the app works with the internet unplugged, nothing about your home leaves it, and there is no service that can go down or change its API. The one thing it needs is your Homey’s location, which it already knows.

Requirements

• Homey Pro running firmware 12.2.0 or newer.
• Not available on Homey Cloud: the app runs locally only.
• Your Homey’s position must be set that is the whole input.
• The public holidays device covers France, mainland or Alsace-Moselle. The sun and moon work anywhere on Earth.

Two devices

Ephemerides — the sky above your home.

Sun	Phase, altitude, azimuth, day length, next solar event and its time
Moon	Phase name, illumination, age, altitude, azimuth, distance, and whether it is above the horizon

Public holidays (France) — today’s and tomorrow’s holiday, the next one, its date, and how many days until it.

Two widgets

Sun and moon puts the current sun and moon position on the dashboard. Public holidays shows what is coming.

Flow cards

Twenty-one of them. The interesting part is not the count but the offsets.

Triggers

Card
[event] happens
[minutes] minutes from [event]
The sun goes up / down past °
The moon rises / The moon sets
The moon phase becomes [phase]
Today is a public holiday / Tomorrow is a public holiday

Conditions

Card
It is / is not daytime
The sun is / is not above °
It is / is not the golden hour
It is / is not the blue hour
It is / is not between [start] and [end]
The moon is / is not above the horizon
The moon phase is / is not [phase]
The moon is / is not more than % lit
Today / Tomorrow is / is not a public holiday
The next public holiday is / is not within days
Today is / is not [named holiday]

Action Recompute now.

Why “minutes from” matters

“At sunset” is rarely the moment you want. Shutters want to close twenty minutes after it, outdoor lights want to come on fifteen minutes before, and a greenhouse vent wants an hour either side. Rather than fourteen separate cards with hard-coded offsets, there is one card: pick the event, pick the number of minutes, before or after.

Twilights that do not exist

At high latitudes and in Paris in June, which surprises people some twilights simply do not occur. The sun never goes far enough below the horizon.

The app says so rather than inventing a time. A Flow waiting on astronomical twilight in a Norwegian summer will not fire, and that is the correct answer, not a bug.

Languages

English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch.

Reporting a problem

Post here with your Homey firmware version, the app version, your approximate latitude, and the event concerned. Latitude matters more than anything else for this app: half the odd behaviour people report turns out to be a twilight that genuinely does not exist that day.

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Feedback and testers welcome.

Have Fun

[Peter_Kawa]

Nice initiative, Henri!
Can you tell whats the (dis)advantage(s) from the very stable app “Sun Events” please?

[HenriDO]

Thanks! Let me be fair to Sun Events first: it has been around far longer, and it runs on Homey Cloud, where mine doesn’t Ephemerides needs a local Homey, because of the widgets. On Pro, Pro mini and self-hosted we’re on equal footing.

On the solar events themselves we’re closer than you’d think. Ephemerides covers the same fourteen, from night end through to nadir, but as a single card with a dropdown rather than fourteen separate triggers. There’s a second card that takes those same fourteen with an offset: “twenty minutes after sunset”, “fifteen minutes before dawn”, one card, whatever number you like. Twenty-one cards in total, so it isn’t a thin app.

Where Sun Events is genuinely ahead: it has calendar conditions I don’t have — seasons, months, daylight saving and circadian colour temperature for lighting, which I don’t do Au trav

Where I’m on my own: the Moon. Phase, illumination, age, distance, altitude and azimuth, whether it’s above the horizon, and a trigger that fires on whichever of the eight phases you pick. Sun Events doesn’t cover it.

And the sun’s altitude, azimuth, day length and next event are capabilities here, not just triggers. They sit on a tile, they land in Insights, and any card that takes a number can read them — so you can plot the sun’s altitude across a month.ail all.

There are two dashboard widgets, and French public holidays, which I’ll admit is of limited interest outside France.

Both use suncalc and both compute offline, so neither of us wins on accuracy. Mine is younger and reaches fewer Homeys. It’s not a replacement it’s the same sky, described rather than just announced.

I’m working on two more widgets…

I hope this is useful.

[Peter_Kawa]

Thank you, merci beaucoup, for the extensive reply.

One remark though:

@HenriDO

and it runs on Homey Cloud

No, Sun Events also doesn’t, it is a community app as well