Hi folks, hoping you can help. I recently migrated from the ST platform. When performing operations such as setting colour temperature or level adjustments with LIFX bulbs on that platform, these were stateless - that is, I could set those options for the bulbs without it causing the bulb to switch on. This was useful for various automations where, for instance, you arrive home late, want the bulb to first be set to candle, 1%, then turn on, rather than immediately switch on and blind you while it transitions to the state you ultimately want it in.
My experience of this sort of automation on hubitat is that either a colour or brightness operation causes the bulb to switch on. This is not only different from ST but also the experience in the LIFX app. Am I missing some obvious option to have these bulbs operate statelessly within the Hubitat system?
Yes, the "Set Color," "Set Color Temperature," and "Set Level" commands in Hubitat will turn a device on if they are off; this is standard behavior. (Some drivers have one or more "prestage..." settings that prevent this, but this is confusing for both users and apps because it modifies the standard behavior, and no new stock drivers use this command. It remains for backwards compatibility in some older ones.)
For a while some newer drivers added commands like "Preset Level" if the device appeared to support such a thing. I believe this originated in some Zigbee drivers. However, this turned out to be non-spec Zigbee behavior, so I suspect we won't see much more of it. But there are devices that actually can do this (where it's not an accident), and I believe LIFX are one. You should see commands like "Preset Color Temperature" and "Preset Level" on your devices. These are the ones you want to use the prestage some value without turning the bulb on if it's already on. Then, the next time it turns on, it will be set to these values already.
For some more history and likely future: because this isn't widely supported, I doubt we'll see more of these commands getting "standardized" into platform-level "capabilities" that apps can depend on (and the one introduced for level may be going away). However, any driver can do this kind of thing as a custom command regardless, which the LIFX drivers are probably doing given that this standardization at the platform level never made it farther than level (e.g., no color). I suspect those aren't going anywhere--they just might become (popular?) custom commands instead of anything further standardized at the platform level.
Lots of apps might not be able to work directly with these commands, but a rule or custom app certainly can. If you have trouble figuring out how to make what you have work, someone can probably help if they know more about your automations.
