Hue lightning/strobe effect for Halloween - How?

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I’m trying to create a Halloween automation where my Hue lights flicker for a few seconds, and then my animatronic zombies would turn on. I’m not sure how to set up a strobe/lightning/flicker effect for the Hue. Can anyone help?

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As Halloween gets closer people will be posting thier automations. Several lights don’t support it, but have you tried ‘flash’ in the light.turn_on service call?

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‘effect’ looks interesting also:

effect yes Applies an effect such as colorloop or random .

I wonder if there are any other effects?

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Thanks for the suggestion. I gave flash a try. It simply turned the lights on and then back off one time. I tried stringing together multiple flashes, but that didn’t really replicate a flicker or strobe. I also tried turning the lights on and off several times, but that didn’t really work either. I think the problem is the default transition of Hue lights is too slow, Rather than a straight on/off, it transitions to on and off over the course of about 1/4 second. That doesn’t sound like much, but it is enough to spoil the effect.

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@_Mike flash has two options ‘short’ and ‘long’. Long gives 10 flashes I think, short just one.

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Thanks for the info. I’ll give that a try. I just wish you had sent it prior to Halloween! :slight_smile:

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As I was looking for something similar and didn’t find something, I asked ChatGPT to create an algorithm to simulate lightning effects.

I have put it in a small github project for people to (re)use:

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Hi @slyoldfox, I landed on this page with your GitHub project having some disco sort effects for my Hue led strips.

The scenes I can create in the Hue iOS app (if you save a created scene they will show-up in HASS by using the Hue integration (Philips Hue - Home Assistant) are limited.

For example I cannot create an effect together with a 3-color gradient. When choosing an effect in the Hue iOS app I can only choose 1 color. Besides that are the effects limited. There is not really a party/disco mode or strobe mode.

So I really like to use and check your project. But the readme on the installation is a bit limited related to my knowledge. For example how do I " Run npm i to install the dependencies" and how do I run the javascript nod a make the calls?

Would it be possible to give some additional instruction how to setup each step?

Thank you very much for your help

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You just install node from nodejs.org …