Newbie here, and I'm sure this is a terribly basic question. I am using some of the subject LED strips in my home and have figured out how to use a global variable to change pixel effects on several strips at once. One piece that I'm struggling with is changing the actual color on any of them. I can change the color within the device driver via the Set Color control, but once I do that, I can't figure out how to get them back to white. Is there a way to click white on the color wheel that I'm missing or something I should be passing as a set color command? Thanks for your patience and any assistance.
Lights like this one generally have two color modes, RGB (or HS or any other model you might use to describe "regular" colors) and CT (color temperature, i.e., shades of white). When you run a "Set Color" command, you put them into RGB mode. It's not impossible to get shades of white this way, but it's generally much harder. How requires an understanding of the color model. In short, Hubitat uses the hue/saturation/value model (or hue/saturation/brightness--same thing, but it's confusing because hue/saturation/level is different and Hubitat's "level" attribute is, in fact, the brightness). Hue ranges from 0 to 100 in Hubitat's model (0-360 in most others, scaled here), where both extremes are red and the colors in between follow the rainbow. Saturation is the intensity of the color, which also ranges from 0-100. A value of 100 is fully saturated: the bluest blue, etc. Values closer to 0 get whiter, i.e., less saturated (in fact, 0 should be white).
So, low saturation is one way to get shades of white, as long as you find a hue you want. In Hubitat's color picker, hue is the slider on the left, whereas saturation and brightness are the big slider on the left (top right is fully saturated at 100% brightness; left to right is saturation, up and down is brightness).
But that's generally a lot harder, and for this light it's entirely unnecessary. What you want instead is CT mode. The "Set Color Temperature" command will do that for you. Color temperature in Hubitat is expressed in Kelvin, which you might also see some bulbs (fluorescents or LEDs, most likely) advertise. Values close to 2700 or 3000 are the familiar "soft white" or "warm white" most people think of for household lighting. Values closer to 4000 are less yellow, and by the time you get over 5000, most people would say they're blue-ish, and it might make you think of office or grocery store lighting. The Inovelli LZW45 says it has a range of 2700 to 6500K, so any value in between there should work. Every brand/model might have a slightly different range, though something close to this is pretty common (some can go a bit lower, which I really like for late night!).
Or...if you don't want to read all that, just use "Set Color Temperature" with a value of around 2700 and see if that's what you're looking for.
Exactly the detail I had hoped for. I had played around with saturation and hue, but it appears I had the option all along of sending an entirely different command. In other words, I can use the set color command to change colors and then simply send a desired kelvin level under the set color temperature command to get back to the whites. If I have that right, I should be able to set global variables up for both setting colors and then reverting back to whites. Thank you!!