I made a candle flicker and think I broke the Device?

[bangali]

try inserting a couple of seconds wait between the activate and execute piston tasks.

[Nunkistein]

I was JUST thinking about Halloween lighting pistons. Some awesome stuff here. Can’t wait to give to give them a shot! All my bulbs are Lifx bulbs, 25 total (a blessing and a curse). Since they are most Definitely cloud-based I wonder how the above pistons will do…there’s a pretty big delay in smartthings when it comes to showing what the bulb is actually doing. I have to use the “refresh” command in webcore often. Hmmmm…Let’s the testing and tweaking begin!

[bangali]

not specifically for halloween but generally for any holiday light, heres another one:

Holiday Lights: 4th of July / Diwali / Halloween / Christmas - Your Pick

UPDATE: new single piston version with support for pausing lights and sound. you can also use this with only lights and no sound. to disable sound set soundEnabled flag to false and save the piston. if flag is false the soundSpeaker device variable can be left empty. to pause the light and sound this uses a global variable called @pauseHLCRaFp please create this global boolean variable and set it to false before restoring this piston. once this piston is running, from another piston set this va…

[Jrrobertson3]

Hey @Gopack2! I have tested your Candle Light Effect Porch 1 and its looks pretty good. I am using it with DimmingCREE lights though (not RGB) and they are a were a little too bright so i brought the random down to 10 & 40 and 30 & 60. Cool work sir!

[Gopack2]

I would like to take credit, but that’s jdoggs inspiration.

[borristhecat]

Thanks @JDogg016 for the inspiration, I got a few more things to try but I added a random low temperature to the mix to make it even more realistic. Great idea!

Edit: actually having a small issue with this, i have osram RGB tuneable white lamps they work fine for about 20 seconds then they seems to stop for a bit then carry on. I think its too much information for ST to process constantly.
@bangali is there a way to have something like, after 10 loops wait for 5 seconds then continue? My thinking is it will then give ST a small breather space to then take the next load. I then have another piston that when i change the mode back to a normal one if its come from this mode wait for 20 seconds before it fires. 20 seconds was enough last night when i tested but if i leave the flicker on for a longer time it has more of a backlog to clear and then that piston doesn’t fire correctly.

[borristhecat]

Hi @Gopack2 i just learnt from me trying the temperature thing that the randoms are wrong on this level 1 is set at between 35 and 95 % and level 2 is set between 50 % and 125%. I suspect what is wanted is between 35 / 60 and 50/75? if so it needs to be (35 + random(25)) and (50 + random(25)).

[Gopack2]

Thnls I will adjust and try. What I was referring to with the random though in my question to Bangali was the the random setting of the scene, in my piston with code gyytw. It sets the scen but won’t alway change accurately. It seems to get stuck on a set scene. Even though it’s suppose to be a different one.

[bangali]

doing a long run of this kind of flickering logic will sort of freeze the light for a while. this may be helped by pairing this sort of flickering with a motion sensor where the flickering only happens for 30 or 60 secs on motion active and uses a slow long fade task otherwise then changes to flickering on the next motion and so on.

just ignore me if you have run this continuously for 30+ mins and dont see this freezing behavior happen enough to disrupt the light show.

[bangali]

did inserting a wait after setting the scene and before executing the flickering, help?

[Jrrobertson3]

@JDogg016 - Sorry about that! Great Idea sir! Gives the front of my house a cool effect!

[borristhecat]

This is what’s happening too mine but I don’t have any motion detection (untill nest protect allows it anyway, would be so good if they did) so how else could I fix it?

[bangali]

hmm, its going to happen.

see this post:

I made a candle flicker and think I broke the Device?

@JDogg016 thanks for the great idea. here is the one i settled on for use on halloween day outside. not quite candle flicker but more like halloween lights flicker. [image]

i added the first if to manage that a bit. you will have to play around with the values on line 35 and 41. 15 iterations and 5 seconds respectively, seems to work for me.

BTW, in the first if i forgot to set i back to zero. so within the first if block also set i to zero.

[Gopack2]

.Not really. I’ve tried the wait, I’ve tried moving the set scen variable around. Not triggering correctly. It sets the correct random scene. Bot won’t pass it to lifx reliably. Seems to get stuck on one scene and never changes, even though the variable is changing correctly. Is there a way to see what sb]cene is applied? Something like [porch1,Porch2,Porch3,Porch4: currentlifxScene]

I suppose I could try cases with the variable. Then use the lifxscene value from the dropdon as a way…

[bangali]

i dont use lifx so cant really try it. but what if you set a 60 second wait timer right after setting the scene and before executing the piston … does that make a difference?

[Gopack2]

No I pulled the candle flicker piston call out of the piston and same results. I will try later. Been a long day of work and I got three more of them to go… I’m going to try a case method and see if that works better

[bangali]

sorry to hear. good luck!

[borristhecat]

I think I understand the 1st if part of the piston but how would I get it to work with mine as yours is for random colours, isn’t it?

[bangali]

sorry, i missed this question. did you figure this out?

[borristhecat]

No not yet been trying to fix my other one before introducing something else.