The Thames is still rising, and we’ve got another three days of rain forecast …. so that should be fun.

In other news, I’ve “done a thing”. In the Office – at least – I’ve finally got the Meross MS605 working as expected, and it was all down to a bit of a Road to Damascus moment this morning.

The lovely support person at Meross confirmed that the sensor only polls lux every five minutes (to preserve battery), but mentioned that they’d ask the Developers if that could be made user-definable. So I was still stuck somewhat with how to make the “day work” – as in, turn on the lamps if I’m at the desk, and the light drops.

It hit me then that I had no concept of what lux value “too dark” or “bright enough” were. I also had no idea of what the sensor was doing as it was sat there.

Cue a genius idea. I’ve written an Apple Shortcut that polls the lux sensor evey ten minutes, and then prepends the value (with timestamp) to a Noteplan entry. That showed that the lux value was rising and falling as expected, and gave me a couple of trigger points at which to fire the automations. And ……. it appears to work! Turn-on is set at ten lux, and turn-off at 36. (As I sit here in the dark though – having just got back from the daily Waitrose – I realise that I need to add a “If presence sensed, condition lux below 10, daytime then turn the lights on” to cater for coming back home after the lights have auto-turned off based on presence)

I’ll get onto that now.