houseplan-card/docs/SUN.md

Sun on the plan — the spec (source of truth)

Status: approved by the owner 2026-08-03. Shipped in v1.56.0. Scope decisions final: the compass lives in the GENERAL settings with a per-space override, the feature is silent until north_deg is set anywhere, wedges ship for the FULL card only in v1, and mutual shading of the building's wings is explicitly NOT computed.

Principle

The plan learns where north is, and from that single number plus HA's own sun.sun the card knows where the sun stands relative to every wall. Two visuals follow: the stage background can breathe with the day (day → golden hour → dusk → night), and windows on exterior walls cast soft wedges of light into their rooms. Everything is display only — no entities are created, no services are called.

Data

• Source: the sun.sun entity (attributes.azimuth 0–360, 0 = north, clockwise; attributes.elevation in degrees, negative below the horizon). No sun.sun in the install → the whole feature stays silent and the settings dialog says why.
• Sun attributes update rarely (~30–120 s). Sun geometry is recomputed ONLY when (azimuth, elevation) or the config change — never on every hass tick. The wedge layer memoises on (azimuth, elevation, config rev, space id, weather state).
• Angle on the plan: plan_angle = azimuth − north_deg (normalised to 0–360). With north_deg = 0 the top of the canvas is north; the direction TOWARD the sun on the canvas is (sin(plan_angle), −cos(plan_angle)) (y grows downward).

Compass — settings.north_deg

• Integer 0–359, degrees clockwise from "up on the canvas" to true north. Lives in the GENERAL settings (⚙) as a circular dial: drag the «N» arrow around the ring, 1° steps, 15° with Shift held; a plain number input sits next to it for accessibility and precision.
• Per-space override in the space settings (empty = inherit), the same pattern as show_lqi / fill_mode.
• While north_deg is null at BOTH levels the whole sun feature is inert: static background, no wedges, nothing computed. The settings dialogs show a hint.
• Backend validation: integer in 0–359 at both levels.

Plan background — settings.bg_mode: 'static' | 'daynight'

• Global default in the general settings, per-space override (null = inherit). Default 'static'.
• 'static' — the existing bg_color behaviour, color picker and all. Nothing changes for existing installs.
• 'daynight' — the stage background follows the sun's elevation: WHITE at full day (the brightest moment of the day is white — owner, 2026-08-03), a warm bright shift in the golden hour (elevation below ~10°), cooling through dusk, deep darkening at night. The scale (piecewise-linear between stops, BG_STOPS in src/sun.ts):

  elevation	color	phase
  −90°…−12°	#070c14	deep night
  −4°	#131a28	dusk cools down
  0°	#4a3527	warm band right at the horizon
  +10°	#e8ddcf	morning light — warm and bright
  +30°…+90°	#ffffff	plain day, white
  The PLAN
  itself dims only ~10% at night (filter: brightness(.9)), so the
  daytime room fills stay readable. Transitions are a CSS
  background/filter transition tens of seconds long;
  prefers-reduced-motion gets the current colors statically.

• The UI is a two-option selector; the color picker shows only for 'static'.
• Backend validation: In(['static', 'daynight']) at both levels.
• 'daynight' follows the general gate: without north_deg (or without sun.sun) it behaves as 'static'.
• The scene background never bleeds through the plan (owner, 2026-08-03). In BOTH modes the background — bg_color or the daynight sky — is visible only AROUND the plan: opaque .hp-paper shapes sit under everything the plan draws. An image plan papers the backdrop image rect (the canvas IS the paper); a hand-drawn plan papers the ROOM CONTOURS — one shape per room in exactly the room's own geometry (fill only, no stroke), never their bounding box, so the background reaches the exterior walls of an L-shaped house and fills the gaps between detached buildings (an empty drawn space has no paper). Open (virtual) boundaries do not affect the paper; a live resize preview moves it together with the rooms. Its colour is the pre-bg_color canvas — white for hand-drawn plans, the theme card background under an image. The night dimming above is the brightness filter on the zoomwrap ONLY; the paper's alpha never changes. Applies to view/kiosk/editors and the static space-card alike (smoke_bg_color).

Window light wedges — settings.sun_rays

Boolean, global + per-space (null = inherit), default OFF.

For every opening of type «window» sitting on an EXTERIOR wall — a wall stretch with no other room on its outer side, decided by probing the existing room geometry just off both sides of the window; windows on interior walls do not participate, and open (virtual) boundaries never qualify because both sides are rooms — the card draws a wedge when BOTH hold:

• the sun is above the horizon (elevation > 0), and
• the dot product of the wall's outward normal with the direction toward the sun is positive (the sun actually faces this window).

The wedge is a quadrilateral cast from the window's span along the direction AWAY from the sun (light falls inward), clipped by the room's polygon (polyclip intersection, the same dependency src/resize.ts already uses). Its length is k(elevation) in window lengths: ~2.5 at sunrise/sunset tapering to ~0.8 at the zenith (0.8 + 1.7·(1 − elevation/90)^1.6). A linear gradient runs bright at the window and dissolves inward; the color is warm orange while elevation < 10° and neutral by day; peak opacity is modest (~0.18 — two overlapping wedges never exceed a readable ceiling). Near the horizon the opacity ramps in over the first ~2° so wedges never pop.

Layer order: ABOVE room fills (and the glow layer), BELOW devices and labels (those live in the HTML devlayer anyway). Night (elevation ≤ 0) → no wedges. Wedges work under BOTH bg_modes.

Cloud cover — settings.weather_entity (optional)

String entity id or null; GLOBAL settings only. When set and the entity's state reads overcast, the wedges fade by an opacity multiplier — ~0.25 fully overcast, 0 (gone) in rain/snow:

states	factor
clear, sunny, clear-night, windy, exceptional, unset entity	1.0
partlycloudy, windy-variant	0.7
cloudy	0.4
overcast, fog	0.25
rainy, pouring, snowy, snowy-rainy, hail, lightning, lightning-rainy	0.0
unknown, unavailable	1.0 (a dead sensor must not kill the sun)

Backend validation: string or null.

Edge cases and limits

• No sun.sun → silent feature + a hint in the settings dialog.
• north_deg unset everywhere → silent feature + a hint.
• prefers-reduced-motion → no transitions; colors and wedges render statically for the current sun position.
• Kiosk mode → works (same view path).
• Static houseplan-space-card → the background honours the effective bg_mode/color; wedges are v1 FULL-CARD ONLY (documented limit).
• Editors (plan/devices/decor) → no wedges and no day/night: the editor canvases render exactly as before.
• Mutual shading of the building's own wings (an L-shaped house shadowing its inner corner) is NOT computed — a lit window casts its wedge even when another wing geometrically blocks the sun. Accepted v1 limit.
• Wedges of windows on all four wall orientations are unit-tested, including the 359→0 azimuth wrap.

Files

• src/sun.ts — pure logic (angles, day phase, exterior walls, wedge quads + clipping, cloud factor, settings inheritance); unit-tested in test/sun.test.mjs.
• src/houseplan-card.ts — the memoised wedge layer, the day/night stage background, both settings dialogs (compass dial included).
• src/space-render.ts — the static card's background only.
• custom_components/houseplan/validation.py — the four settings at both levels; tests in tests_backend/test_validation.py.
• demo/smoke_sun.mjs — end-to-end behaviour against the demo rig.