Issue with rotary encoder dimming a light group

Configuration
1

I have setup easyesp with a rotary encoder. The encoder is configured with a value from 1-100 with every ‘click’ making 4 steps. I have also tried setting it up with a value from 0-16 with 1 step per ‘click’ and translating that to a brightness value from 0-255, but that only improves it just a little, but is still pretty unusable.

I then use the state value of the rotary encoder entity to control a lights brightness_pct from 0-100.

If I view the entity of the encoder in hass, the value goes up and down very smoothly when rotating the encoder. So that works just fine.

As long as I use a single light, that all woks just fine and pretty smooth.

However when controlling the brightness of a hass light group OR a Philips Hue room/group of lights, this results in very unreliable dimming. The Hass light.turn_on > brightness_pct (or the brightness) command seems to have trouble catching up with the rotary encoder entity state value.

This is my configuration:

sensor:

    - platform: mqtt
      state_topic: "/ESP_Easy/rotary1_dimmer/state"
      name: "Livingroom 2 dimmer 1"

Automation:

    - id: livingroom_2_dimmer_1
      alias: "Livingroom 2 dimmer 1"
      trigger:
        platform: mqtt
        topic: /ESP_Easy/rotary1_dimmer/state
      action:
        service: light.turn_on
        entity_id: light.livingroom_group
        data_template:
          brightness_pct: '{{states.sensor.livingroom_2_dimmer_1.state}}'

Is there anybody who could point me to the solution for this issue?

2

You have to keep in mind that the automation triggers for each change of that sensor, so if you for instance turn your knob from 0-100 in one second that translates to 100 automations beeing triggered in one second and that means 100 service calls to set the lights to that particular percentage. I would not be surprised if that would cause some interference.

3

Ok, but how does that explain that it does work flawlessly if using just 1 light in stead of a light group? I also tried creating the group in hue, so that hue translates the single light entity to the respective living room lights, but that doesn’t help either :frowning:

4

How did you go with this?

Any solutions? I was thinking of using this for my kitchen lounge lights

5

Why don’t you create a script that changes the brightness.

Run a script via automation with each change in state, but add a condition that the script is not already running.

In the script add a 250ms delay after sending the brightness command.

This way you won’t send more than one command every 250ms.