OK i have a roommate that has hearing problems. Legally he is deaf but he is in denial and will not let this take away from living a normal life. I'm proud of the guy and one of the mayor factors i rented him the room.
Well backstory out of the way here is what i was wondering. Is there a way to make a zigbee light strobe?
Like i said he is legally deaf and his alarm goes off and wakes me up on the other side of the house lol
My thinking is setting a light to strobe at whatever time he has to wake up and that way he doesn't have to rely on the vibrations of the alarm to wake him up, and believe me he oversleeps almost every other day unless we both have the same starting time then i will wake him up. I don't know if they make any alarms like that but if it's possible with hubitat it would be great.
Nope none of mine will flash. Just got rid of the HUE lights not sure if those will have that option. At least i know that the home depot ecosmart brand does not flash, those are the majority in my house right now.
Certain devices do support flash. I have 2 of them, one is the z-wave aeotec micro switch g2(gets wired into switch box or light fixture):. The other is a cheap zigbee socket. Which although working fine it does report low signal, but has not failed in a week so far.
You could also, as stated above use a rule with any device,
Most bulbs don't support this natively (though there is the rare bulb or lightstrip with built-in "effects" that can do this). As mentioned above, the only certain way to do this is with an app or a rule--nothing special, just something that sends "on" and "off" commands at your desired interval until you make it stop. This is also how the built-in "Flash" command works for a lot of Z-Wave drivers in Hubitat. It (either app or driver doing this) is also a great way to saturate your network with Zigbee or Z-Wave commands and maybe have something not work if you do it too fast or with too many devices at a time.
Since you mentioned Hue bulbs and the Ecosmart bulbs that are Hue-compatible, do you have these on a Hue Bridge or directly paired to Hubitat? Hue bulbs can sort of flash: they support an "lselect" (long select, I assume) command that will cause the bulb to do a "breathing" (almost a flash, though a bit smoother) effect for about 30 seconds. I think the Ecosmart bulbs and most Zigbee bulbs will do this, too. But you need some way to send this command to the Hue Bridge. If you're familiar with the Hue API, sending an HTTP PUT can do this. It's also part of my CoCoHue custom Hue Bridge integration app for Hubitat--a custom command on the device. This might help. Or if you can get what you want done via Hue Labs, I'm working on integrating "formulas" from that now, too. Either way would take a lot of work off both your Hubitat hub and its Zigbee or Z-Wave networks, offloading it to the reliable Hue Bridge network, which might work better.
But if you don't go totally crazy with it, a few bulbs with an app or rule and repeated on/off commands will probably be fine regardless of protocol or hub/bridge.
I have all ecosmart bulbs directly in hubitat. i was without internet for a day this past week and all my hue lights would not work at all and that was the reason i migrated to hubitat to get rid of the cloud. Today i took all hue lights out and replaced with ecosmart.
If i can make this happen it will only be for one light in his room.
Hubitat's Hue Bridge integration works locally over your LAN. If it wasn't working without Internet, then there is another problem. (For example, are you using an all-in-one modem/router/switch-type device from your ISP where it going down also makes your entire network go down?)
Pairing the bulbs directly to Hubitat is a perfectly fine option, too, at least if you don't have certain Zigbee bulbs that are known to be on the "naughty list" of bad repeaters (Cree, Sylvania/Osram, I think Hue, and others) and have non-bulb Zigbee devices on the same network (the only reason this would be a problem: they repeat poorly for those). So I don't want to steer you away from that, either. But a Hue Bridge should be fine, too, and personally I find it more reliable for bulbs, though I'm curious if upcoming changes in Hubitat firmware 2.2.5 will make that better (I tried a bulb-only hub a year and half or so ago but switched back to the Hue Bridge).
I did have a all in 1 modem router from my ISP and bought my own. During the migration of the old to the new that's when HUE went dark but all zigbee lights worked without a problem.
I have noticed i have a very good mesh with the ecosmart bulbs. I set a contact sensor about 20' away from the nearest bulb and kept going 5' further every day and see how far i could go, i stopped because i got to the end of my property to where my well and water softener is i think about 50' from the house and the sensor was out there for a week without ever loosing it's signal.
I moved to a mesh router now but haven't disconnected it to see if i have connection with the hub.
