I’m working in my first automations and have some issues that i can not fix without some extra advice.
The main goal of what i’m trying to do is change brightness and light color over a period of time. I basically want to make a “multi scene” bathroom light with a function that kinda is similar to a wake-up light.
The lamp I want to use does not seem to support transition. I’m not 100% sure of where the transition is handled, but after some research i kinda fill like its probably handled by the lamp itself. When i try to do this with a IKEA Tradfri it works, but it does not work on my Lidl lamps. I’m using the transition function in the action part of the automation (see code below)
A transition allows me to change brightness over time, but it does not allow me to change color over time to. I want to change temperature color form warm to colder light while the time progresses.
Such a " wake-up light" scene should not start at 0% (or the lowest the LED bulb will support). I would like to set a start point and a end point. For example, start at 20% and end at 60%. I thought this would be possible by setting 2 actions, but (with the IKEA lamp) this does not work. If i set the first action to start at 20%, and the next action to make a transition to 60%. The result is that the the visible part of the automation just starts at the lowest point of what the lamp can do. (20% is brighter).
So basically i dont know how to add these function to an automation, or maybe its just not possible. Maybe i need to set something up that sends a new Zigbee message to the lamp every few seconds, or maybe there are some smart plugins that can to this.
Hope you guys can suggest a solution! Thanks in advance!
The transition effect is handled by the physical device. If the device doesn’t support the effect then using the transition option produces no result (as you have already discovered).
There’s a script posted in this forum designed to produce a transition effect for devices that don’t support it natively. Basically you specify a starting and ending brightness and the desired duration. It uses that information to send a continuous stream of brightness commands to the device separated by an optimum numbers of seconds to produce a reasonably smooth transition. However, it doesn’t support changing color temperature.
Just to add, it probably wouldn’t be that hard to write something that can handle a brightness and warmth transition. Just use the repeat and delay actions to make a for loop, calling the light service every loop.
Here’s the script I mentioned. Full credit goes to mrsnyds who developed the original version; I simply consolidated his version into a single script and streamlined the code. You’ll see that the calculations to determine the optimal refresh interval and incremental brightness change take several lines of code.
However, if someone knows of a way to simplify it even further, and add color_temperature, then it would be a great contribution.
Oh, wow, that is definitely more foolproof than I imagined. When I said “not that hard”, I was thinking of a much more specific script, but this is certainly better.
Here’s an idea for how to add warmth, but I don’t have a use-case for this so it is untested:
Field Additions
fields:
start_mireds:
description: The starting warmth for the light, in mireds. The minimum is light-specific and can be found in the light state.
example: 155
end_mireds:
description: The ending warmth for the light, in mireds. The maximum is light-specific and can be found in the light state.
example: 500
`Calculate` Variable Updates
transition_secs: >-
{% set b = state_attr(light, 'brightness') %}
{% set start_level_pct = 0 if b == none else (b/255*100)|round %}
{% set end_level_pct = end_level_pct|int %}
{% set t = transition.split(':') | map('int') | list %}
{{ t[0]*3600 + t[1]*60 + t[2] }}
delay_milli_sec: >-
{% set delay_milli_sec = (((transition_secs/(end_level_pct - start_level_pct))|abs)|round(precision=3)*1000)|int %}
{{ 100 if delay_milli_sec <= 99 else delay_milli_sec }}
warmth_step: >-
# This one might be able to be less sloppy,
# just trying to divide the the mired difference by the number of projected steps
{% if start_mireds and end_mireds %}
{{ (end_mireds - start_mireds) / (transition_secs / (delay_milli_secs / 1000)) }}
`Execute_Fade` Sequence Updates
- service: light.turn_on
data_template:
entity_id: "{{ light }} "
brightness_pct: >-
{% set x = start_level_pct|int + (repeat.index|int * step_pct|int) %}
{{ ([0, x, 100]|sort)[1] }}
# Unsure of the behavior of this if the warmth value is undefined, this may need some adjustment
color_temp: >-
{% if warmth_step %}
{{ start_mireds + (warmth_step * (repeat.index - 1)) }}
Thanks you so much! that sounds like what i need. To be honest i find it a bit difficult to add this script to HA. I cant paste it into scripts. It doesnt allow any of that code. When i manualy try to add it to scripts.yaml it doesnt create a new service. Basicaly i have no clue what im doing./… sorry
The script I created, based on mrsnyds work, is over a year old and doesn’t take advantage of subsequent scripting enhancements. I plan to re-write it. You can be the first tester …
Here’s an updated version of the Light Fader script. It’s substantially more compact than the previous version and incorporates the latest scripting features (including the need to provide default values for various filters). It also provides a more modern UI when it’s used in Developer Tools > Services.
My testing was limited to brightening/dimming a light (both worked properly) and cancelling the fading process by manually controlling the light. None of the tests produced errors or warnings in Logs. Now it’s your turn to put it through a more grueling battery of tests.
Copy-paste the following script code to your scripts.yaml file.
Show script code
light_fader:
description: 'Fades lights to a desired level over a specified transition period.'
fields:
light:
name: Light
description: Entity_id of light.
selector:
entity:
domain: light
example: light.kitchen
end_pct:
name: End brightness Level
description: Integer value from 0 to 100 representing the desired final brightness level.
selector:
number:
min: 0
max: 100
step: 1
mode: slider
default: 50
example: 80
transition:
name: Transition Time
description: Transition time for fading indicated in HH:MM:SS format (Hours:Minutes:Seconds).
selector:
time:
default: '00:10:00'
example: '00:05:30'
mode: parallel
sequence:
- variables:
start_pct: "{{ ((state_attr(light, 'brightness') | int(0))/255*100) | round(0, default=0) }}"
end_pct: "{{ end_pct | int(0) }}"
delay_msec: >-
{% set t = strptime(transition, '%H:%M:%S').time() %}
{{ ([100, ((((t.hour*3600 + t.minute*60 + t.second) / (end_pct - start_pct)) | abs) | round(3, default=0) * 1000) | int(0)]|sort)[1] }}
sign: "{{ 1 if start_pct < end_pct else -1 }}"
- repeat:
while:
- condition: template
value_template: >-
{% set b = state_attr(light, 'brightness') %}
{% set b = (b/255*100)|round(0, default=0) if b != none else b %}
{{ repeat.index <= 102 and
( (sign == 1 and (b == none or b < end_pct)) or
(sign == -1 and (b != none or b|int(0) > end_pct)) ) and
(b | round(0, default=0) == start_pct + ((repeat.index - 1) * sign)) }}
sequence:
- service: light.turn_on
target:
entity_id: "{{ light }}"
data:
brightness_pct: "{{ ([0, (start_pct + (repeat.index * sign)), 100]|sort)[1] }}"
- delay:
milliseconds: "{{ delay_msec }}"
I can confirm it works (mostly) but there are a few problems.
It doenst alway reach full brightness (zigbee2mqtt debug log stops at a random point)
often this is after its first brightness step.
If i try to switch it off during the transition using a zigbee switch and a HA automation, it doest always work. usualy i have to press 2-3 times.
I’m not sure what is causing this. I may need to do some more testing, but i can see it just stops after a random number of steps. Hopefully i have more time to test soon.
Looking at your script, i dont see any possibility to set a start brightness or color temperature but i guess i can try to add these (i just have no idea where to start )
Possibly due to flooding the Zigbee network with a stream of commands.
In order to produce a fairly smooth transition effect, the script must send many incremental brightness changes. Depending on the chosen transition time, it can send a command every second (or faster). In fact, the script is able to send them as quickly as every 100 milliseconds. Clearly, this can produce a lot of traffic (and can double as a ‘stress test’).
I tested it with a UPB light switch. This technology works be sending signals through the powerline. In theory, its latency is greater than Zigbee (i.e. Zigbee is faster) however I succeeded in testing it with a ~660 ms interval.
Yes, getting the light’s attention manually can be a bit tricky because it’s busy receiving (and acknowledging) all the commands sent by the script.
tl;dr
Buy a light bulb that supports transition natively.
I didn’t add that functionality and, based on your light bulb’s poor performance with this script, I won’t be investing any time doing that.
Again thank you so much for your reply and all your support! Sorry for my late reply, i have been a little busy lately.
I’m guessing you are right with flooding the Zigbee network and maybe even my other devices. I was testing at very short times between 10 and 60 seconds. If there are 256 levels of brightness thats way to many messages per second. Its actually pointless too because you will never notice that many levels of brightness.
Ideally such a script would limit the amount of messages to (for example) 1 per second. If i want to go from step 100 tot step 200 in a period of 10 seconds, it should be limited to 10 steps of 10. or at 50 seconds, 50 steps of 2. I guess this should be possible but i just not that good with programming to do it myself, but i can try
I agree i could purchase a lamp that supports transitions. I might send my Lidl lamps bank and buy IKEA ones. No issue with that, and maybe the IKEA lamps are better anyway. I have to test more…
However, that does not solve all my issues. I would like such a script to support a transition of color temperature too, and i want it to start at a certain value. This is something that does not seems to be supported by any zigbee lamps. I guess a script could do this.
If you can help out with code, that would be highly appreciated. If not, thanks anyway! You really helped me a lot already. I can try on my own, but i dont really understand much about coding. If i will find a way i will surely post it here!
first of all many thanks for the script! actually I do have a dimmer which supports transition but the effect is not as good as with your script ;). I still do have some inputs/questions that I would like to place.
It seems that the script increases the brightness in one-percent steps. question: is it possible to increase the steps in integer-steps 0-255? for example from 0% to 10% would be 0 to 25 in steps of 1.
I found these attributes in the script-section. brightness value is in percent, brightness in integer.
Why am I asking this? The dimming-process basically looks good but the brightness-increase is noticeable and it doesnt look that natural.
Disclaimer: I dont have much coding-experience, so I might dont use the right technical wording but I hope I can express it the right way. Maybe I am also wrong and it already increases the brightness in integer-steps.
I would be happy to test the script and give feedback.
love it!
works perfect for my needs…
use esp32 and grow light led…. with PMW …
only a small issue that i‘ll had to put „“ in the code
used before a python script that failed sometimes …
this is way better now…
thx … no issues
M.
I can’t for the life of me figure out what I’m doing wrong with this script, but I’ve just been experimenting with it on the services tab of developer tools and I can’t seem to get it to do anything. I’m not getting any errors or anything, but when I’ve tried fading my Hue lights or Meross dimmer, nothing happens whatsoever. I’ve tried fading from 0-100, 100-0, and everything in between; I just can’t seem to get it to work.
Any ideas where I could be going wrong? As I said, I’m not getting any errors.
EDIT: One thing I’ve noticed is that when I’m using the UI editor it shows the transition time as a (clock) time, with AM/PM as options. This isn’t what’s shown on your example screenshot.
I have the same issue as @pmcenaney. Got the script, inserted into automation, but can’t seem to get it to work possibly due to HA seeing the transition time as an actual time with AM/PM values.
I noticed that hh:mm:ss when I changed to the new version of the script.
Here’s my setup with the new version. This is in yaml at the script level in a script/automation. Meaning not from the developer tools UI is where this would be used or in the developer tools switch to yaml and you can test this there too.
That might be the issue. Taras said above it was tested with a UPB light switch which isn’t a bulb and it worked. I’m not an expert but what are the attributes of the switch, do you see errors when attempting to run the script, how do you control this dimmer?
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