Virtual Shade Behaviour

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I just tried out the virtual shade device in order to control some DIY MQTT blinds via Maker API and node red and found that the actual open/close/set position commands don't get sent until 10s after the virtual device is activated. At this point the status of the virtual device simultaneously updates.

So nothing happens for 10s and then my blinds start moving and the device tile shows it at being open at whatever setting was selected. Shouldn't the open/close/position command get sent immediately? I can live with the arbitrary 10s status message delay (but being adjustable would be nice),

Tagging @mike.maxwell (sorry if I'm tagging the wrong person on this!)

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I guess you could look at this a number of ways, in this case we have chosen to have the device report it's position when it is done traversing. The travel time is set to 10 seconds, I'll see about adding some transition time options which would make this device more usefull...

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Thanks for considering this Mike!

Not sure if I was 100% clear though - my main problem is that within node-red I can see that the message payload from the HE virtual shade device (which contains the command parameters like setting the blind position etc and which gets relayed to my blind controller) only gets sent at the same time as the report message (ie after the preset 10s) so my blinds can only start moving after 10s. I guess I kind of have 2 issues:

(1) send the open/close/position command immediately so it can be passed via maker API to the blind controller to start opening/closing without delay; and then
(2) have the virtual shade report the desired position has been reached after a period of time (which would be proportional to a set-able delay from fully closed to open). This is nice to have but not absolutely critical.

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Hi Mike, any progress on this? Not sure if you saw my post above regarding when the close/open command actually gets sent.

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A transition time of 0 was added in platform 2.2.1

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Thanks, I'll check it out!

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Hi Mike, I just tried this virtual shade device and I input values other than 10 seconds, but the transition time seems to not be changing. It seems to continue 10 seconds even if I change the input to 5 seconds or 30 seconds, for example. Could you look into it, please?

Thanks.

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I'm having a similar problem. I also notice that the Virtual Shade device is notoriously unreliable when imported into Alexa. I wouldn't use it except that I have no way of including different blinds in the same room as one group. So I had to create a virtual blinds device using this driver and make rules to control them.