Sengled Color Bulb

I recently installed a Sengled Element ColorPlus Smart Bulb. This is my first time working with a color bulb.

I'm trying to understand the difference between "set color" and "set color temperature".

At first, I was just using set color in my rule, and it was working as expected. Later, after I had spent some time on the device page, I noticed set color was no longer giving me the correct color in my rule. Maybe I changed a device setting that caused this problem? So I started combining set color with set color temperature to get the correct color. Not sure if I should be doing this. Should I use only one or the other?

Could someone please explain "set color" vs "set color temperature" and how I should be using those in my rules?

Also, I notice "Enable color staging" on the device page. Does this allow me set the color before actually turning the bulb on?

Color and color temperature are different ways of describing light. Color is what it sounds like. It sounds like you maybe not be familiar with "color temperature," which is more or less a term forward "shades of white." Different bulbs different ranges here, but something like 2000-6000 is a typical range for many (the unit is K, or Kelvin), with 2700 K being more or less an incandescent temperature (3000 K being pretty similar and sstill pretty warm). The lower you go, the warmer the color temperature gets (meaning more yellow/orange). The higher you go, the cooler of a white you'll get (more blue-ish).

Most bulbs can operate in either "color" or "CT" (color temperature) mode, so it's unlikely doing one after the other has any real effect. If you changed the driver, did you hit Configure after? (You should.) if setting color or CT doesn't appear to do anything, have you tried sending that same command again? This is a problem I've seen with some bulbs, including Sengleds (they don't get it until the second time). Color prestaging is indeed supposed to allow you to just set a color be hind the scenes but not turn the bulb on if it's currently off, something most bulbs will do (turn on) any time you ser a level, color, or CT. If its on, that setting shouldn't matter, but you could always try it both ways to see if it does. You could al so try the Generic Zigbee RGBW Bulb driver to see if it behaves better. Thr Sengled shoiks work with the either, but it got a dedicated driver a couple firmware versions ago to experiment with features like prestaging.

I'm familiar with color temperature (Kelvin) as it applies to white bulbs.

What I don't understand is how color temperature applies to colored bulbs.

Also, I don't understand hue and saturation. Can hue and saturation be set within Rule Maker?

You'll want to learn about HSL (Hue-Saturation Levels). I usually hate linking to Wikipedia, but in this instance, the article is actually really well written.

Yes. You use the Set Color action and choose Custom Color.

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Non-smart bulbs generally have a fixed color temperature, as you must know. Most smart bulbs that allow you to do color also allow you to do "shades of white," i.e., go into the non-color mode (CT mode) I mentioned above. There are some exceptions, like the first-generation Hue Lightstrip that don't have a good mix of LEDs to let you do much with white light; those are color only. Most can handle both. Some can only handle color temperature (e.g., Hue White Ambiance, Sengled Tuneable White, etc.), and others can't do either and are fixed like a "dumb" bulb (Hue White, Sengled Soft White, Sengled Daylight, etc.).

What a bulb allows you to do depends largely on what LEDs the manufacturer used and how well they can represent shades of white or color, but again most color bulbs allows you to set things in either "mode" (only one of which the bulb will consider active at a time). Ultimately it also depends on what Zigbee clusters the firmware implements. There are odd exceptions, like the Ikea Trådfri color bulbs that only allow color and don't implement the Zigbee color temperature clusters despite being able to do them quite well (in fact, their colors are a bit lacking and whites are pretty good--which you can emulate with great difficulty by finding hue and saturation values that approximate what you might get from certain color temperatures; the Ikea Smart Home app even lets you set them to white, presumably doing its own RGB thing behind the scenes).

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Color bulbs can also provide white light at a point in the CT scale. The bulb will list on the edit device page whether it is in CT (color temp) or RGB (color) modes. It cannot be in both at the same time. So, when you are issuing both CT and Color commands at the bulb, they are contradicting each other. A bulb can only be in RGB or CT mode at any given time.

This is what my Sengled Element Color Plus looks like when it's in RGB mode:

image

And this is what it looks like in CT mode (when it is white).

image

Yes, that is exactly what that does, if the bulb is off. However, if you set color and level at the same time, the bulb will turn on. However, you can also turn on Level Prestaging in the Sengled bulb drivers now. So, if both are on, the bulb will not turn on unless you send an ON command or if you set the bulb to the same level that it was last set to. So, if previously the bulb was at 100% when it was last on and you send a setLevel 50, the bulb will not turn on with Level Prestaging turned on. However if you send a setLevel 100 command, the bulb will turn on with Level Prestaging turned on. Also, if the first case, if you setLevel 50 twice, the bulb will also turn on. Never found out whether that was intentional or not but it seemed like it was not going to get changed any time soon. So, prestaging with the native Sengled drivers is a little finicky.

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Thank you very much for your detailed response! You cleared up a lot of issues I was having. :grinning:

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Does the “flash” command work with Sengled?
What does “toggle” do?

Toggle swaps the power state (on goes to off and off goes to on). The native Sengled driver does not support the flash command. I don't know if the device does.

Is setting dim to zero exactly the same as setting the bulb to off?

I just tested this with the dedicated Sengled Color Element Plus driver, and it appears to be: it turns off the bulb but remembers the last dim level. (This isn't the same for all of my bulbs: doing a setLevel(0) on a Hue Bridge bulb or one directly paired with the Generic Zigbee RGBW driver causes the level to get reported as 0 by the driver at the light to turn on at the lowest possible level, presumably 1 to the bulb but something Hubitat still reports as 0 for some reason, if issued an on() afterwards; again, the Sengled instead remembers the level and is always reported as such. I did not test this with the generic driver on the Sengled.)

Remember that the Sengled drivers now have Level Prestaging. So, that further complicates things when it comes to setting level on the Sengled bulb and might be a reason why they are not behaving the same as Hue integrated or Hue direct bulbs.

I have prestaging disabled, but in all cases we are talking about doing a setLevel(0) when the bulb switch is on (when prestaging is not applicable), so I can't imagine why it would matter. Probably worth testing both ways, however, since the driver is new and semi-experimental, I think...though my assessment here would be that the Hue bulbs are the ones acting weird. :slight_smile:

The OP was also a question about setting Color or Color Temp. So, just wanted to make sure that it was clear that there are other options that might be making things look different between the behavior of these two devices. I couldn't figure out why some of my automations involving Sengled bulbs wasn't working correctly when I swapped out some other devices for Sengled bulbs. And prestaging was the "gotcha" that had me pulling my hair out for a couple hours.

If I press Pico button 4, then 5, then 1, the level goes to 10, but it should be 100. Whenever I press button 1 it should go to level 100, but depending on the order in which I press the buttons, this is not the case.
Now, if I press button 1 a second time, it will go up to 100.
I have pre-staging disabled for both level and color on the device page.
What am I doing wrong?

Here's my button rule:

For my single lights, I have precolor and prelevel staging enabled. I just use an on command after the CT and Level. Then it comes on without the transition.I use a setlevel 0 for off. It seems to work well.

I enabled staging and tried your method, and while now button 1 is correctly going to level 100, button 4 no longer sets level to 10!

EDIT: I was mistaken! I had the action for button 5 as turn off. I changed to dim to 0, and I THINK now it may be working.

Let me do some more testing...

For me it took a day for this driver to settle down.

Awesome! Hope it behaves for you now.

Settle down? Uhm....it's software. It should function exactly the same now as it does 10 days from now. If it doesn't, there's a problem.