I've got a bunch of hue lights and just switched to hubitat.
One feature I had implemented was a gradual color change (at dawn and dusk) for various lights.
The main reason for it was to reduce the jarring impact of a light going from soft to daylight. Instead of changing instantly, it slowly changed from the current color smoothly over a minute or more.
How can I perform a gradual color change with hubitat actions?
I had a gradual change from one white to another, and accomplished this in HE with a combination of the Groups and Scenes app and Rule Machine.
First, in Groups and Scenes I set up two scenes: One for the color starting point, and one for the transition end point. Note that the same lights have to be in both scenes. Then I created a transition scene that looks like this:
Then in Rule Machine, I have a rule that has this as part of the actions (it does other things as well that I'm not showing):
I found out that if the lights were off, which is a possibility in my case, the transition wouldn't happen. The IF statement turns the lights on gradually.
"Evening transition scene" is a virtual switch that's automatically created by the transition scene. You'll have to turn it back off as well or the transition won't happen again the next time it's triggered. I've found that it throws an error when I turn the switch off, but everything still works OK.
This is how I did it. But I'd be interested in hearing if there are other ways.
I have lots of Hue lights and was a Stringify user. Was really easy to do there! Any reason you can’t just trigger the event based on time of day? I have noticed the best way to get a consistent fade in the past was have 1 rule that turns them all off and then start the trigger to transition them 45 seconds later (tried shorter but sometimes Hue lights were slow to turn off).
The problem I have encountered is that I cannot make any transition smooth, especially over an extended time.
Previously the transition was over 1 hour and was so smooth you didn't even realise it was happening.
With hubitat I cannot seem to find the settings to make that happen. It seems to send multiple commands to the lights at intervals instead of sending one single command to initiate the transition.
Each 'chunk' of the fade is extremely noticeable and I cannot get values high enough to achieve the same effect that I had with other hubs.
Another challenge is that I do not know the starting color, nor do I want to. I only care about the end, so the scenes approach isn't great for me either, as it causes a jarring effect if the starting color doesn't happen to be the same.
I also do not want to change the light intensity.
Agreed re: Stringify. (I miss Stringify, though I've managed to recreate my flows in HE.) It's also easy to do in the Hue app, if your Hue lights are connected to a Hue bridge. I haven't found a really easy way to do it in HE, so I'm glad to see others weigh in. Turning the lights off and then fading on wouldn't work for my use case, because for me that would make the transition too noticeable. Thus the scene transition.
Agreed. The scene transition app is not that great. I tried a scene transition over 1 minute with 2 second intervals (in an attempt to make it smooth). The scene operated with 10 bulbs or so and the Hub because extremely unresponsive as the scene continuously repeated.
A log time ago there was an iOS app, that transitioned beautifully. I can’t recall the app and I even went so far as trying to figure out how to do certain Hue Lab functions through their API, but it doesn’t appear that route is open to automation.
Point is... I’ve given up on the ‘smooth transition dream’.
Or I could use group/scenes and transitions lol
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