Do "Fade Hue" and "Transition to Color" work as intended with Hue bulbs?

#1

I was playing around with the Fade Hue and Transition to Color actions last night. I am using Hue bulbs.

The “Fade Hue” action works, but for example fading from 0 to 270 over 10 seconds did not produce a very smooth fade. It seemed to change colors in a staccato-like fashion, briefly stopping at colors in-between rather than smoothly fading through the range.

I was more interested in directly transition from one color to another, without hitting all the colors in between. I tried the “Transition to Color” action but found that it didn’t work at all. Lights didn’t do anything. Am I doing something wrong? Is there some incompatibility with this command and Hue bulbs?

Transition To Color
#2

Welcome to cloud processing of a command that you want to happen in 10 seconds. Make it 10 minutes and it will look perfectly fine. But if you want things to happen that fast…you’re not likely going to be happy with what you get.

#3

Yep, what Mike said. The problem is you cannot issue a ‘fade’ command to a hue bulb, or a ‘transition’ command. Instead, WebCore instructs ST at every finite interval to change the brightness by some increment and change the color code by some increment. ST then sends this command to the Phillips Hue Bridge…for each bulb and for each interval…which is then relayed individually…to each bulb, for each interval.

I did find this type a feature works on the Wake Alarm Smart App, where there is a limited number of bulbs and a long fade period. For many bulbs and/or for short periods, I do not think this would be feasible.

If this type of feature is important, you may have to look at the various smart apps within the Phillips Hue bridge collection and see what is in there.

#4

When you say “smart apps within the Phillips Hue bridge collection” do you mean regular apps that I download from the Google play store? The only “smart apps” that I know of within the hue app are the Hue Labs features. There is one called “living scenes” but I was looking for more functionality than it offered. There are a few apps from the Play store that will control the lights in a manner similar to what I’m looking for, but I don’t know of a good way to activate these with an automation.

#5

I meant the Hue Labs. They are very limited in function, but they are the only ones that work real time without having to transmit incremental commands via a wireless or cloud interface.

#6

Looks like the Philips Hue API supports “transitiontime” (section 4.3). Are there plans to expose this in webcore so that fading over time can run locally on the hue bridge? You would still be limited by ST on the frequency of commands sent, but it should solve the smoothness issue that exists with cloud processing of webcore’s fade function.

Another valid Hue command is “effect / colorloop”, which could be useful. But no way to access that via webcore currently.

#7

Would it work that way? I mean, WC itself does not run locally. Also WC does not talk to the Hue bridge. It talks to the ST hub and runs in the ST cloud.

In an ideal situation you’d still need WC to talk to the ST hub and have the ST hub send the command to the Hue bridge to do your fade. I don’t know if that can be done…

#8

I use colorloop on and off frequently in WebCORE. From what I have seen in the past, it is actually the responsibility of the Device Handler to have the ability rather than WebCORE.

Hue Advanced Connect has the ability to colorloop, not sure about other DTHs out there.

#9

I was wondering about that. I think maybe I need to look into the Hue B Smart or Hue Advanced Connect.