Smooth fades in automations for wled is not working

Configuration
1

I have a couple of wled installations in my house. One is a decorative light in the stairwell. I’d like to turn in on before the sun sets and turn it off a midnight. That works using 2 automations with respective triggers (sun or schedule).
Now I’d like to make the transition smooth, that is fade in the brightness of the leds smoothly over e.g. 5 min.

There were similar post in this forum (not including the links as I am not allowed to quote posts as a new user, ha!) but none of them has a good answer.

Here is where I currently stand:

And here are my questions:

  1. For the “service: light.turn_on” call. Does the transition actually work. Would that already suppose to fade.I could not observe it creating any transition, light just turn abruptly on or off. (For now I’ve tried to add the loop + delay to compensate).
    It would really be good to be more explicit in the docs (Light - Home Assistant) whether that is supposed to create a smooth transition or just waits.

  2. The loop. It definitely loops, but the brightness does not increase, it just keeps setting the brightness repeatedly to 10%

This seems to be a somewhat popular goal for people and I am a little bit surprised how hard it is to make this work.

2

I’ve experimented more and it seem that setting the brightness does not work at all.

HA is up-to-date:

Core: 2024.1.1
Supervisor: 2023.12.0
Operating System: 11.3
Frontend: 20240104.0

and WLED is at 0.14.0.

I have removed the brightness from the wled preset and as a mitigation added a final step that calls light.turn_on to set full brightness.

I’ve run this a couple of time and it only lights up a tiny bit.

3

[Solved] New automation:

It seem that one need to target the main light, even though it is just a single segment.

Also with that no loop is required and the transition setting works (I don’t know how many updates it sends though).

4

None.

The transition option only works if the device’s firmware supports it. A single command is sent (by the integration) to the device instructing it to transition to the desired brightness over the specified duration.

A device that doesn’t natively support the transition effect requires using the technique you originally attempted, namely sending consecutive brightness commands until the desired brightness level is reached. There are existing scripts that perform this function posted on the forum. However, it’s better (smoother transition and far fewer commands) to use native transitions if the device supports it.