Color Loop Blueprint with Configurable Colors and Transition Time

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41

I have a bunch of lights out front that light the front of the house.

I have migrated away from my hue hub. I did like the hue dynamic (hue labs) scenes that were possible with the hue hub. Given a group of lights each would cycle through a colour palette. At any one time there was a mix of colours being used.

I am interested in this blueprint to replicate that now that I am no longer using the hue hub. As far as I can tell if I give this blueprint a group of lights all lights in that group would be on the same colour at the same time.

Is it possible to have it so that each light is on a different colour out of the chosen colours?

The only way I see that happening is if I have multiple copies of this blueprint running, one per light. I have 14 lights out front so that might / would end up being cumbersome.

Thank you.

42

Yes right now, with this blueprint thatā€™s the only way you would be able to have different color palettes occurring on different lights.

You can also add a custom Toggle Helper and reference it in all of the blueprints to have one ā€œswitchā€ toggle the color transitions for all lights/blueprints at once.

If you know how to deal with the yaml behind the scenes, it would be less cumbersome to make one blueprint, edit its yaml, then copy/paste the yaml to other blueprints for different lights.

1 Like
43

Hi, Thanks for all your efforts.
Running the automation at 2 second transition time and I am getting this error.

Stopped because an error was encountered at 31 October 2023 at 12:00:44 (runtime: 10.43 seconds)

Could not load a dict; the given string is not valid JSON.: line 1 column 16 (char 15)

The automation just stops, any ideas.
Many thanks

PS I have left on for about 30 minutes on a transition of 10s and it seem ok (but is more like 5 seconds rather than 10)

44

Would it be possible to allow this (maybe even an option in the UI) to select the next color randomly? I know itā€™s called ā€œColor Loopā€. I would like my set of outside lights to slowly fade through the colors Iā€™ve selected but randomly, so they all seem to have their own color sequence. Iā€™ve not looked at the code yet, as Iā€™m pretty new to HA, but I am about to do that.

45

what about cycling between scenes of lights?

46

Iā€™m a bit confused as to what I have to do to have all lights within a group switch to different colours. I currently have one helper, and an automation for light01 to light10. All 10 lights automation are using the 3 x 255 rgb setting as suggested (which seems to go through all the color wheel). However all lights are switching to the same exact color at all times. not sure what Iā€™m missing ā€¦

edit1:

it seems like if I turn on the individual lights in the group one after the other (waiting for the previous to change color), I can get them to be all different, in this group I have 10 bulbs so it takes a pretty long time to get this going.

48

The automation in the blueprint sends commands to an entity. That can be a group or a single light. But the commands are all the same. Apparently you can trick the timing by switching things off and on.
A way to do it that takes some upfront work but is easy afterwards, is like this:you use the blueprint to make a number of different automation, but you link them all to the same helper. Then you can control each color order and timing individually but switch on the looping with a single button.
I donā€™t know if it is possible in YAML to extract the members of a group. If that is possible, it would be possible to change the blueprint such that it automatically gives random time offsets to the different members. I guess that would increase Zigbee traffic though.

Edit:didnā€™t read your post well enough. You already have individual automations. In that case, change the color order and/or timing for each light. I think it would also not be hard to add a random start delay to the blueprint, and add an input for that.

49

@mdolnik , I went ahead and built in this random start delay into the blueprint. It was a fun excercise, YAML isnā€™t exactly my native language :laughing:. I made a fork for it on Github Gist but itā€™s such a small edit that it would be a bit weird to start a whole new fork for it. Perhaps you can update the blueprint? See the code here:

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50

HI
Created a Christmas loop for my outside house lights, just consisting of green and red but I am also getting a yellow from nowhere, which is between colour changes so it more annoying as it is twice the rate of the green and red, I have also checked the Tapo app to check for defaults and states etc but i have a default state of white, any ideas?

Thanks

51

I do believe this is a side effect of how the blueprint works, if you look at the top few posts where author shows the color wheel and how the script ā€œtravelsā€ across it, it becomes apparent that on the way from red to green and vice versa you have to pass yellow twice.

I personally havenā€™t tried suggestions from this thread, but you might find some inspiration there, since you look to emulate xmas lights ie blinking lights not a color loop per se: Blinking Holiday Lights? Best Approach - #5 by dailand

52

I trying to just put a simple light to the blueprint but. Get this message

Message malformed: Entity IDs cannotn be None for dictionary value @ data|ā€˜conditionā€™][O][conditionsā€™][0]

lā€™entity_id"]

When Iā€™m trying to save

Running on latest HA on a rpi4

The light i a ostam led strip and it works as a normal light in HA

type or paste code here
53

Thanks for letting me know, Sorry for the delay, appreciate your input

1 Like