Custom Light Effects for any smart bulb
Right from your Home Assistant
I love smart lights. They add a certain atmosphere. You set them to orange - and its a sunset vibe, perfect for smoking shisha with friends. You set them to white-blue - and it gives you energy. Well, you get the gist. But they are even more amazing when they are dynamic. By dynamic I mean something like effects in Philips Hue or flows in Yeelight bulbs.
Currently Home Assistant has effects implemented on the device’s side. That is if the integration supports an effect (as a string name) - then it is listed and can be set as a light’s state. Unfortunately not all bulbs support effects. Or they dont suppport effects that you like. Or they dont support the same effects as other bulbs do and when you have 2 different bulbs in a group - you cant set them both to the same effect.
Now wouldn’t it be wonderful if Home Assistant were to add custom and predefined HA lights effects? Especially since all the lights that I’ve used define effects as a simple list of color changes with timed transitions. Furthermore most of them (like Philips Hue) even send theese color transitions from the bridge to bulbs, or phone to bridge to bulbs. So there is absolutely nothing stopping HA sending color changes periodically to achieve any effect possible in the same way. (except maybe GIL, heh)
Of course there are some exceptions. For example Yeelight bulbs in default state dont allow more than X commands per minute. But you can allways connect them in a special ‘music’ way to remove this limit and even just the default limit is enough for most slow effects.
So, my feature request is to add
- Home Assistant controlled light effects.
- They will be a sequence of color changes with transition times
- Theese transitions will be sent by HA repeteadly to the lights
- There will be a simple way to add you own sequence of color transitions
- Theese effects will show up in light effects and group light effects
- Theese effects will be available to be set as a part of a scene
- Since there are color bulbs, temperature bulbs and brightness only bulbs, it will be possible to define effects as only temperature changes or brightness changes
- Some of theese effects should be predefined
This will allow any smart light capable of changing its state with a transition time to become effect-capable. Imaging a mixture of slowly changing blue to orange yeelight lights on one side of a room and zigbee bulbs with a candle flickering effect on the other.
Feedback and discussion on this topic is appreciated!
