Same here, also used Twinkly in HACS, after it was removed it work, at least kind off.
I’m trying to add a third Twinkly device by adding the integration for the third time but the reaction is quit short and something like ‘Aborted’ (the message is in Dutch). Any thoughts on that?
Secondly, I’m not able to adjust the brigthness. I’m not sure that should work.
The info seems to be used by HA cause the icon appears less bright on my lovelace card with lower
brightness.
Update 22-12-20
My dev HA has the same issue, max 2 Twinky’s can be added.
Switched back to HACS because I can add the 3 strings to HA
Happy Holiday Season all!
I just wanted to draw attention to a project that has been building upon the xled Twinkly control project recently. xled_plus by Anders Holst works in conjunction with the original xled project to provide easier methods to control Twinkly lights, including setting still colors, pre-recorded or realtime animations. It’s under active development, and the developer has been releasing a new effect daily as a kind of ‘advent calendar’ from the 1st of December through the 24th. I’ve been following along and have documented how I brought the effects into Home Assistant as shell commands here. I even modified one of his released effects to create my own ‘Candy Cane’ animation for my tree(diagonal stripes of red and white, that move down the tree slowly):
I am using the Twinkly integration, but I cannot turn on the lights from HA. Turn off is fine and the switch turns off if I turn it off by the twinkly app. Any ideas?
Sorry, but On, Off, and Brightness are all working for me from the official Twinkly integration. Do the Home Assistant logs show any warnings or errors for Twinkly?
Using twinklys over homekit controller you can also change colors of lights.
Finally if you combine homekit controller with the original hass integration you can turn on your last used scene.
I’m late to the party but I’m here now. This post is from Dec 2021 and I have no reason to assume you’re not using this anymore or it doesn’t work. Can you confirm that your implementation works in the HA of today before I go down the rabbit hole of copying it?
I have the Christmas tree and a bunch of strings grouped as one. Your front end is implemented similar to what I did for the effects implementation of TPLink kl430’s. The only part I’m not super familiar with is the back end so I’ll have to follow along step by step and I just want to validate you’re still using it so I know if I run into trouble, I’ll know it’s me.
Hey this used to work, not sure if it still does. However it’s not needed as it looks like home assistant has an official integration for it now. Twinkly - Home Assistant
But thats just basic on off. What i saw above allowed to call scripts for the effects. Is there a way in the integration to call effects that im missing?
Sergeantpup is correct, the twinkly integration is basic. Just brightness and on/off (but it is still nice to have in addition to the effects).
I only own the Christmas tree, so it’s been in the attic since January, probably won’t get to setting up until Thanksgiving weekend. But I have no reason to believe xled_plus and the shell scripts for Home Assistant have stopped working, unless something has changeed on the Twinkly side.
Suggest following the xled_plus install steps to get yourself to the point where you can run some of the xled_plus examples. Post an issue on the xled_plus github page if you run into trouble installing so that the author can see it if needed.
Once you know you can run from the command line, you can move on to bringing the effects in to Home Assistant. Post here if you run into issues with HA stuff. I’ll offer suggestions if I can (here or on github).
FWIW, my shell scripts were only intended to be a stop-gap to something more polished, but I didn’t get around to doing anything else last season. No promise it’ll happen this one either, but I do have some ideas
Looking to get a Twinkly tree this year. I saw the xled_plus comment here and it looks promising. Any info on how to install xled_plus within HAOS? Is that even possible? Or do I need to run this separately so I can run the pip commands to install the packages?
Sorry, I’m not running HAOS. I understand it’s pretty stringent about 3rd party software (for good reason). If you’re not very sure about what you’re doing, it’s probably safest to install xled_plus separately. Since I’m running the venv install of Home Assistant, it was simple to create a separate venv for xled_plus.
Migrating to HAOS is on my (ever growing) todo list. So if/when I eventually get there, I’ll probably try to get xled_plus working under it as well, and would share my results. No promises about when though!
I’m still learning Python/HA (I’ve worked mainly in the Java and .NET worlds) but I’m wondering if there is a way to accomplish this with pyscript. I’ll play around when it gets closer to Christmas and I don’t look like a weirdo using my tree in October!
Just got my first strand of Twinkly Lights. Very fun, but I’d love a way to have more control. So XLED looks very interesting.
I’m running Home Assistant OS inside of Oracle’s VirtualBox on a Windows machine.
It is very unclear to me how to go about installing XLED in a way that it can communicate with Home Assistant.
Is there a way to install it inside of the Home Assistant OS (you suggested against this), or should I create a Fedora install on VirtualBox and install it there?
In which case, how would I get Home Assistant to trigger XLED commands on this other virtual machine?
I see you talk about that here:
but it’s still unclear to me how they’re talking to each other.
I don’t use Home Assistant OS, but I know it’s very strict with regard to unsupported libraries(with good reason). So I would suggest using another vm or other solution to install xled_plus. In my case I created a python virtual environment in a Raspberry Pi, running raspbian (now Raspberry Pi OS), that also happened to be running HA Core. A Fedora VM should work but might be overkill for just running xled_plus. Regardless, start by getting xled_plus installed somewhere and to the point of running some of the examples manually from the command line before moving on to integrating it with Home Assistant.
The xled_plus project wasn’t created with Home Assistant in mind, so there’s no simple direct communication between the two. My solution was to use shell commands and python scripts to facilitate calling the xled_plus functions from outside of Home Assistant. For simply controlling on/off and brightness, I used the native Home Assistant Twinkly integration.
Once you have xled_plus working from the command line, getting Home Assistant to control XLED using my shell commands method, but from Home Assistant OS, will require doing some setup work using this guide for SSH’ing from a command line sensor or shell command. I can’t help here since I’m not on the HAOS and probably won’t be until (at least) the end of the holiday season.
My tree is still in the attic for another week or so (will probably be setting it up the weekend of Nov. 25th/26th. When I do have it up again, I can walk through my old setup and see if I can provide a clearer set of directions for setting up the HA and xled_plus scripts.
I modified the xled_plus code to accept additional command line arguments (for the color and effect type) so when I change the light colors in Home Assistant, the twinkly light colors also match.
Here’s my in-progress UI for my light setup (top to bottom: light status, hue light scene selection, brightness, speed, type, twinkly effect, which areas to apply the lights, or select a specific color)
Now that I know how to do it, I’m happy to answer any questions about how to set it up.
I didn’t end up using pyscript to get this working, so not required (but I did later install pyscript to convert named colors to hsl values and also loop through the hue light scenes to get a list of unique colors to send to xled_plus)
Excellent! I just finally got my Twinkly tree setup a couple of hours ago. I was pleasantly surprised everything I’d had setup in HA last year ‘just worked’ once I had the tree plugged in.
