Fade to level goes random wacky

#1

1) Give a description of the problem
I have been replacing my Wink with Sengled recently as an upgrade. The Wink DTH used to have a transition delay built in but the Sengled just changes instantly from on level to another. For fun I tried to replace line 59 with “Fade to” (without the expression, just stock) instead of “Set level” and I got a random display of levels in an endless loop. I had to get into the piston and revert the line before the house started working again.
I didn’t have the logs on and if I try to get logs I fear the endless loop with make that hard to do.
Guesses?

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#2

When you added fade to level, what did you put in for the time duration?

The built-in webCoRE fade really only works well for long fade durations. If I remember right, the fastest frequency a piston can wake itself up to set a new level is every 3 seconds. Then you have to factor in how quickly your device and its DTH can process each level change. Depending on your system, this can be a few seconds as well.

If you try to fade something quickly, say 100% to 50% in 5 seconds, you’ll likely see one of two things in your log:

  1. webCoRE will complete the fade in one or two steps, making for a very ‘stuttered’ fade.
  2. More likely, based on what you see with the lights, webCoRE will flood your poor device with a string of level set commands that are tenths or even hundredths of seconds apart. These build up a queue of commands and don’t always get processed in order, so a higher level may be set as your last step.

All that said, in my experience I don’t have a good solution for “fade to level” in short durations using webCoRE. It works great if you fade over minutes, though.

I’ve tried to program fades into DTH’s too, but haven’t been able to reproduce the same smooth fade I had using a system designed with it in (Lutron, for example).

#3

I put in 10 seconds but based on your experience the Fade To will never work for me. Most times we want the lights to dim for a movie and waiting minutes for a slow dim will anger the audience :slight_smile: I went back to using the non-local Wink DTH and we’re back to a nice few second transition. Hopefully ST allows custom DHT’s on the new UI when they tag me for the upgrade!