Suggestions for zigbee bulbs capable of slow fade in?

Hardware
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#1

Hey all,
My main dream for seeing up home automation was to be able to have the lights transition from total darkness to a medium brightness very slowly to stimulate a dawn sunrise before my alarm goes off.

I bought a bunch of Phillips Hue bulbs and a Conbee 2 zigbee controller, but the challenge is that as soon as the brightness goes from 0% to 1% in home assistant (or Phoscon), the brightness of the bulbs seems to go to about 75% of full brightness, making for a rather abrupt waking up experience.

I’m assuming that this issue comes from the Hue bulbs themselves, although I guess it could be from the Deconz software, too.

Can anyone suggest any zigbee compatible bulbs, that can do very dim levels of illumination, so I can get a nice slow morning dawn effect?

#2

I can only speak for my system - but I have a CC26X2R1 controller, hue bulbs and I use zigbee2mqtt and they work absolutely fine.

If we’re home as it starts getting dark, my living room lights fade up slowly from off to 85% over a period of 10 minutes.

That said, there’s no real noticeable difference in the brightness of the bulbs once they go below 10%, so it does look like they come on a bit brighter than they should, but definitely nowhere near 75%. That’s on white bulbs (which is what I have in the living room), the coloured bulbs in the bedrooms go ‘dimmer’ to the eye if you use a sort of golden colour at the start of the fade.

#3

That doesn’t sound right, I use a ConBee II, Hue and deconz as well and as Marc said below 10% it doesn’t change much, but my lights fade in and out just fine and certainly now 0 to 75% whenI change from 0 to 1% in either Phoscon or HA.

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#4

All I know is that changing between 75% and 95% is barely perceptible, but going from 0% to 1% makes it go as bright in 1 second as I would like it to be after about 10 minutes of transition.

#5

Can you maybe show a video or picture?

#6

If it’s a question of the minimum brightness being ‘too bright’ then my suggestion would be a hue colour bulb, set it to somewhere between gold and red and you can get the perceivable brightness so low that it’s almost not on.

If it’s a question of your bulb being faulty and not reflecting the correct brightness you set, then possibly another correctly working bulb would do it.

Unfortunately I suspect video recording the bulb, as suggested by my esteemed colleague above, won’t actually help us diagnose the issue as your average digital/phone camera will adjust itself accordingly to the amount of light coming from the bulb (unless you have some high end recording equipment) giving a different result to what you’re actually seeing ‘in the flesh’ - but you could give it a go and see.

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#7

Thanks for the advice. I’m pretty sure that it’s not just a faulty bulb as I have 8 bulbs and they all seem to operate the same way. Possibly there might be some quirk of either HA or the Deconz software sending a higher brightness signal than expected, but I doubt it.

I mocked up an image to show roughly how bright 1% brightness shows up:
lighting

Anyway, I think it’s more like you suggested that the minimum brightness of the bulb is too bright (ie 1% brightness is more light than I want). That’s a great suggestion about using a color bulb. I guess I’m just wondering if there was a cheaper way with a different brand of dimmable white bulb. I’m just not sure what brand might do dim settings darker?

#8

@Synappz i have the same issue. I have rgb lights and minimum brightness is too bright. I’ve just tried pure red and the bulb is still too bright, and doesn’t respond to winding back red from 255 to 1.
Did you find any bulbs that fade in slowly with a low minimum brightness?

#9

Unfortunately not. Every bulb I looked at advertised online seems to show the maximum brightness, but none of them seem to show the minimum brightness (while turned on). If anyone comes across anything, I’d love to hear about it!