Previously, we were using gentle wake up with Phillips Hue BT bulbs. This worked OK, but recently the reliability of the Phillips Hue bulbs have made them unusable and we are returning them. Gentle Wake up is meant to work with any lights, but it is not for us. The scenario we need is to be able to set an alarm using the built-in routine command "Ask what time the alarm should be set for" (or a similar custom command if one exists).
These are the possible setups we could use, none of which are working:
- Using a Nest Hub (2nd generation), with sunrise alarm. The reason this doesn't work is because it's not possible to set a sunrise alarm using a routine. It would have to be set manually
- Using WiFi enabled smart bulbs with either the Nest Bub or Nest Mini, with Gentle wake up enabled in the room. If I have enabled gentle wake up, nothing happens. If I ask Google to wake up my lights, it sets them to 1%, and then nothing more happens.
Does anyone have a workaround for the bug that actually works?
Work arounds I've seen:
- Set the sunrise alarm manually on the Nest Hub. No - we set the alarm for different times each day - it is ridiculous to not be able to use a routine. What is the point of them otherwise?
- Turn the light on at 1%, then have Google "wake up" the light. Doesn't help, because you can't have the light turn on half an hour before the alarm.
- Reset the devices. This happens with every device and every bulb. So no, I'm not resetting them again. Or uninstalling and reinstalling the app.
I would say it's astounding that this hasn't been fixed. But these days it's not. None of the bugs are being fixed. New features are being introduced and all existing features are just being left alone. I'm sure it's nice for the Google developers to get work on exciting new features, but you really need to spend time fixing the existing ones as well.
