Groups & Scenes Newbie Question around "Duration"

I am relatively new to Groups & Scenes and upon using it I had 1 question and 1 observation.

The question is "Set Color Temperature" & "Set Level" seems to accept a "Duration" but "Set Color" does not. Is there a reason why?

The observation is "Set Color Temperature" accepts a "Transition Time" while "Set Level" accepts a "Duration" and I believe these are semantically equivalent in this context. Should they be synced to use the same verbiage?

Thank you!

This is just because Hubitat's "Set Color" command does not, by spec, necessarily accept a transition time parameter. See: Driver Capability List - Hubitat Documentation. Some devices may actually support this, but because of this, there is no "contract" at the driver level that the driver implement this or that an app can rely on it.

But there is an apparently undocumented method that often works: I've noticed that some apps put a rate key in the Map that gets passed as a parameter to setColor(), and many built-in drivers (and probably some community drivers, not just mine?) respect it. Some drivers may also have an option to just specify this in general, not for any specific call of the command but for all (the new-ish Advanced Zigbee Bulb family of drivers, I think?), while others may not have any method of doing so at all. To use rate, you'd pretty much need a custom app, but again, there's also no guarantee that it would work since it depends on if the driver looks for this key in the Map, and because there's no requirement for it, some may not.

This issue isn't specific to groups and scenes, by the way, just a thing related to the "Set Color" command in general. Perhaps, some day, at the platform level, this could be standardized (maybe adding a second "real" rate parameter to make it easier to use in apps or manually on the device detail page, or at least putting the undocumented map key as a documented option?). The similar rate parameter you noticed with "Set Color Temperature" is also new-ish, so these things occasionally do happen...but just might take time to work more widely across drivers if/when it does. :smiley:

Thanks @bertabcd1234 is this also why "Groups and Scenes" does not support "Start Level Change" & "Stop Level Change". I was reviewing some of the presets for your [RELEASE] Dimmer Button Controller (configure Pico to emulate Hue Dimmer or any button device to easily control lights) which is what sparked me down this rabbit hole.

I guess a better question is that I have always heard it is better to group bulbs using "Groups & Scenes" but if I wanted to make use of the "Start Level Change" & "Stop Level Change" does that mean I am relegated to specifying each bulb individually? Does this introduce any popcorn effects with the bulbs being controlled in this manner?

No, this is just a choice they made, perhaps because not all devices you might put in a group support it or because even ones that do may respond differently. (It would be great in some cases, IMHO, though!)

Yep.

Possibly; you'll get more Zigbee traffic from the hub. But whether this is is actually going to be a problem depends on your environment. I've still had pretty good luck (though most of my bulbs are Hue now on the Hue Bridge, and I use/wrote a custom integration that supports this for Hue groups, which are defined on the Bridge and also use group messaging).

@bertabcd1234 Thank you again!

I would be curious as to how we could influence whether or not we could get "Groups & Scenes" to support level changes.

In my eco-system, I am using LIFX and I have long thought about the notion of creating a "proxy bulb" that would service and be able to respond as a LIFX bulb and proxy behind the scenes to the underlaying bulbs it represents. I guess similar to what you are doing with the bridge.

Thank you again for your response!

It's been asked a couple times in the past, at least, from what I remember. Here's one, and you can probably find more with a search:

There's some discussion there, perhaps more elsewhere, too, but I guess nothing was ever decided. :smiley:

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