Is there a hue-integration specific service that would save a scene into the philips hue hub?
The reason I am asking is that the native HA scene.create service seems unaware of light groups and requires snapshooting each individual light (i.e. the hue group that refers to say all the lights in a room cannot be used as a target for scene.create as it doesn’t contain details for the individual lights as far as HA is concerned).
However, if I use the individual lights in a room as the snapshot entities in the scene.create call, then when I later restore that scene using scene.turn_on – the lights turn on one at a time, which is kind of choppy and not nice .
My solution would be to try and save the scene as a native hue scene so when I restore the scene later, all the lights turn on at once and look perfect and smooth.
Does anyone know if this is an option or perhaps there are alternative ways to accopmlish snapshotting and then smoothly restoring scenes for Hue lights.
When you activate a Hue scene, a single command is transmitted and received by all members of the scene. That’s why their behavior is synchronized.
When using individual lights, a command is transmitted to each one separately. That’s why there’s a perceptable delay in how each light reacts (the “choppy” effect you mentioned is also called the “popcorn” effect).
The more I think about it, the more it makes sense to me that actually scene.turn_on should be aware of which lights are Hue and send the commands via the native hue integration. I just don’t know if the public Hue API (or the one exposed to HA, not sure if they get something special from Hue) has support for that – take in a list of lights and RGB+brightness values, and issue a single command like native hue scenes do.
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