Steady Blue, Clear View — A Hancock Beacon for My Front Post
The Hancock weather beacon lives. From the street, one of my smart bulbs now glows steady blue on a clear or partly cloudy day (steady blue, clear view, as the diddy goes), flashes blue under full clouds, and turns red when rain rolls in — the Old John Hancock Building's trick, recreated on my front post with a bulb that costs less than lunch.
The fun part isn't the bulb — it's what's driving it. No single device or vendor app can do this. The bulbs themselves can't know the weather. Their apps can't talk to each other, let alone a forecast service. The logic lives above the devices: Home Assistant watches the weather source, decides what the sky means, and commands the lights — regardless of which ecosystem each bulb was born into. Mix brands, add a bulb, tag it, and it inherits the whole behavior. That cross-system leverage is the whole point of bringing everything under one orchestrator.
I'll be honest about the process, though: establishing something cool is good, but the refinements are where it gets better — and they take time and experimentation. The first version worked and was unimpressive. The bulbs politely ignored the built-in flash command, so the beacon glowed where it should have blinked. Each round of experimentation taught the script something new: pulse the brightness instead of trusting the bulb to flash; dim first, then glow; let every light flash in unison instead of taking turns; tie the resting brightness to a single dial I can drag from a settings page. Every refinement was small. Together they turned "a light that changes color" into something that genuinely reads as a lighthouse in bad weather.
And the door stays open: the beacon currently trusts a fifteen-minute forecast source, so the next refinement — a nowcast layer that goes red before the first drop lands — is already on the bench. When a beacon can outrun the rain itself, you'll read about it here.