Most wake-up lights I have come across are a single bulb on a nightstand doing a slow fade. This build treats the entire bedroom as the lamp instead, with the brightening synced to a song rather than a timer, and Home Assistant runs the whole sequence from start to finish.
The hardware is simple but well placed. Hidden LED strip lighting sits behind an upholstered headboard covered in light-colored fabric, which throws a warm glow across the room, and two wall-mounted reading lamps flank it on the dark teal wall. Those lamps came from Homesense, and part of them was painted by the maker's wife. The sequence opens with a faint red glow on one side of the headboard, then spreads and warms through amber toward warm white, while Circle of Life from The Lion King plays, and both lamps fire at the song's climax to light up the room. The bulbs are Philips Hue gen 1 color bulbs, and a script named script.sunrise can be switched off from Home Assistant.
In real use the sunrise runs roughly 15 to 20 minutes; the demonstration version is sped up. The maker puts the yearly savings at over $400: skipping four bus trips weekly for 48 weeks at $2.35 a trip works out to $451.20, with the walk to the office taking 30 minutes against a 7 minute walk to the stop plus a 10 minute ride. The reported outcome is that the snooze-until-the-last-minute habit is gone.
Not everything is finished. The alarm briefly flashes white because lights revert to their prior state before the set state, and the planned fix, dropping in a low red state before the lights go off at bedtime, is unproven. There is no way yet to shut the alarm down once it fires; a spoken command for going back to sleep is planned. The sconce cords are unmanaged, the wife finds the music jarring so it will be changed, and the ideal sunrise duration is still being hunted down.
Project by Craig Midwinter. Watch it on their YouTube channel: