Question with Transition Time

[gomer23]

Hello, I just started working with this add on today. I was playing around trying to create a "pulsating" effect with 1 color.
I toggled on the option to run the settings in order, with 4 "colors". Each one is set to green, alternating between 255 and 40 brightness.

On the main settings I have Frequency for the changes set to 2 seconds
Transition time was set to 30 seconds, I changed this to 1000 and didn't seem to make a difference.

The way I understood that setting is it should take 30 seconds to transition to the next color in the loop. Is that incorrect?
Currently the states are changing every 2 seconds and there doesn't seem to be any transition time.

[chazzu]

The transition time is passed straight to the light service as if you called light.turn_on with that transition time set. The animation just fires it, telling the light to take that long, and then moves on, it doesn't wait for the transition to complete. So if the transition time is set to longer than the frequency of the changes, it will kick off the next change before the transition is done.

The exact way a light will handle this probably depends a bit on the light. For mine, the transition will start but get interrupted and then start transitioning to the next. What you might be seeing is it ending the transition immediately, and then beginning the transition to the next color.

[gomer23]

Thanks for that. That does make sense. I also found out here that the Wiz lights may not accept the transition parameter through the API. So I could be running into that as well.

One question on the above comment, basically the transition time can't be higher than the frequency time basically? The transition time setting I think said the limit was a much larger number than the 60 seconds for the frequency. Technically is there a way of you wanted a 120 second transition time to do that?

Thanks!

[chazzu]

It might make sense for transition time to be longer than frequency. Suppose you have 2 lights. You set the amount to change to 1, and the frequency to 30 seconds. So once every 30 seconds, it will change 1 of the 2 lights. You could set the transition time to 45 seconds, and roughly half the time the light would actually take the 45 seconds to transition.

Currently, the transition time is only passed on to the light, so it will vary from light to light. The transition time was set to an arbitrarily large number because I'm just not familiar with every light out there and I didn't want to set it too low when there might be some case where a higher number makes sense. Technically, Philips Hue accepts up to 6 hours though I don't know if the lights will actually take that long to change.

To answer your second question, it really depends on the light. You could script your own transition... I created the automation blueprint below for this purpose. It takes a long time to slowly change the brightness of a light. The same principle could apply to color.

blueprint:
  name: Slow Turnoff
  description: Turn light off very slowly
  domain: automation
  input:
    lights:
      name: Lights
      selector:
        entity:
          domain: light
          multiple: true
    minimum:
      name: Minimum
      selector:
        number:
          min: 0
          max: 80
          step: 1
    maximum:
      name: Maximum
      selector:
        number:
          min: 80
          max: 100
          step: 1
    delay:
      name: Delay
      selector:
        number:
          min: 300
          max: 3600
          step: 1

mode: restart

trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id: !input lights
    to: "off"
    variables:
      action: "off"

action:
  - variables:
      lights: !input lights
      delay: !input delay
      last_step: "{{ delay % 300 }}"
      minimum: !input minimum
      maximum: !input maximum
      steps: "{{ (delay / 300) - (1 if (last_step == 0) else 0) }}"
      step_amount: |
        {% set amount=namespace(value=1) %} {% if steps > 0 %}
          {% set amount.value=(maximum - minimum) / steps %}
        {% endif %} {{ amount.value }}
  - service: light.turn_on
    metadata: {}
    target:
      entity_id: "{{ lights }}"
    data:
      brightness_pct: "{{ maximum }}"
      kelvin: 2400
  - repeat:
      count: "{{ steps }}"
      sequence:
        - service: light.turn_on
          metadata: {}
          target:
            entity_id: "{{ lights }}"
          data:
            transition: 300
            brightness_step_pct: "{{ 0 - step_amount }}"
        - delay:
            hours: 0
            minutes: 5
            seconds: 0
            milliseconds: 0