What’s the state of a light (Hue, for example) during a transition on or off? If it’s one or the other, and not some magical third state, which is it when you’re headed from on to off or off to on? I have some complex automations (via Node-RED) that I’m working with and would love to know.
Thanks!
I light entity’s state string should only ever be 'off' or 'on', nothing else. And it should be 'off' only when it’s fully off, and 'on' at all other times.
Now, having said that, depending on the light integration (I don’t personally know anything about Hue), it may have other states, such as 'unavailable'. But that should only happen when something is wrong.
Totally makes sense. I’m actually troubleshooting an issue where I use transition=10 for a 10-second slow light turn-off but the light ends up at minimum brightness, not actually “off” even though that’s what I’m calling for. I’m sure I’ll figure it out. Thanks for the info!
On the surface that sounds like a bug in the light integration you’re using, or maybe an inappropriate configuration. E.g., with Z-Wave lights, often they require adjusting parameters to make sure the state of the light entity stays up to date with the actual device properly.
So I just spun up a poll-state in Node-RED to be sure and sure enough, HA reports the Hue bulb is “off” during the transition process from on to off. I’m back on 0.103 so maybe something has been fixed since then, or maybe there’s truly an issue. We’ll see!
The more I think about it, I think reporting as OFF makes sense if the transition process is being handled completely by the hardware (hub or bulb) which in this case it is.
Watching the state second-by-second shows that, at the very end of the 10-second transition, the bulb turns back ON at brightness “1”. Hmm.