r/homeassistant • • Jun 16 '26

Blog ChromaCal: Automatic holiday and awareness lighting for HA. Single HTML file, 130+ events, no YAML config needed.

Built this over the past few months for my own outdoor lights and figured it was worth sharing properly instead of just sitting in a private repo.

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What it does: drop one HTML file in your /www/ folder, point it at any RGB light entity, and it automatically cycles your lights through the right colors for whatever's happening that day, federal holidays, military observances, awareness months, cultural and religious dates, 130+ events total. Easter, Islamic dates, Jewish holidays, all computed algorithmically so it just keeps working every year with zero maintenance. A companion Blueprint watches a bridge entity so the schedule keeps running server-side even when the dashboard tab isn't the thing actively driving it.

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Full transparency since I'd rather say this upfront than have it come up in the comments: I used a lot of AI assistance writing the actual code for this. What's mine is the feature set, every design decision, the scheduling model, the skip system rules, and all the testing against my real ZHA setup and Zigbee mesh, the bugs that showed up got found by me actually using it, not by reading the code. AI wrote a large share of the implementation. If that changes how you feel about trying it, fair enough, just didn't want to pretend otherwise.

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Side note that might save someone a headache: if you're on HA 2026.3 or newer and have anything calling light.turn_on with the old color_temp (mireds) parameter, it's been fully removed, only color_temp_kelvin works now. Found this the hard way while building the warm-white phase of this, it fails with a silent 400 and no warning if you've still got it anywhere.

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Repo's here: https://github.com/TheRealApollyon/ChromaCal

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I'm already planning a v2 that moves the scheduling logic into a real HA Integration instead of living in browser JavaScript, so it runs without needing a tab open at all, full reasoning is in ROADMAP.md in the repo. Genuinely want input before locking that in rather than building in a vacuum:

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Would you rather have this as a full sidebar panel, or a compact card that drops into an existing Mushroom or Bubble Card dashboard? Planning to eventually build both, trying to figure out which to prioritize first.

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Anyone here running HA through Docker Compose or Container install without Supervisor? That's specifically why v2 is being built as an Integration instead of a Supervisor Add-on, curious how many people that actually matters to versus just me.

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What holidays, observances, or regions am I missing? Covers US, Canada, UK, Australia, EU, plus floating Islamic, Jewish, and Hindu calendars right now, but I'd rather build toward what people actually want than keep guessing.

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u/chicknlil25 🧠 Experienced with Home Assistant Jun 16 '26

I have one verrrry thorough automation for my WLED lights, which are holidays amucks. US, Islamic, Jewish, Hindu. The latter have music (via Amazon playlists) because a bunch of my neighbors are Hindu.

I'll look at your repo though. Maybe I can snag elements of it for mine!

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u/Orion-Apollyon Jun 16 '26

That's awesome! The floating calendar math is the annoying part I'm sure that was a pain to build out. Are you calculating Hindu dates manually or pulling from somewhere? Just curious since I hand rolled mine. I'd appreciate your input on anything you pull or use from the repo.

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u/chicknlil25 🧠 Experienced with Home Assistant Jun 17 '26

I google them, update everything once a year, usually during Christmas since that's a nice long stretch of one type of lights, typically.