Inconsistent transition time across different LZW42s and firmwares

Lighting Firmware Discussion
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#1

I’ve noticed some inconsistent transitions between several of my LZW42 bulbs.

I’m running the latest versions of Home Assistant and zwavejs2mqtt. I normally make all my changes to the brightness of bulbs directly through a lovelace card or via Google Home. I am NOT making service calls and editing the “transition time” parameter. I’m using this custom lovelace slide entity card that defaults to just brightness_pct for lights

I prefer the bulbs to instantly turn on/off or instantly go to a set brightness value. Makes the bulbs feel more “normal”. The transition time for me is just a tad too slow.

I believe when I updated to from OZW to zwavejs2mqtt all my LZW42 bulbs transitioned instantly. However, for some reason now some of my bulbs are slowly transitioning.

With help from @freshcoat in the HA discord server I was able to troubleshoot and find some differences.

On the production firmware, 2.28, I have noticed some bulbs both transitioning slow as well as instantly.

I updated one of these slow transitioning bulbs to the latest beta firmware, 2.31, to see if it changed anything. Unfortunately it did not. I also tried re-interviewing the bulb to see if it that changed anything. This also did not change the speed of the transition.

@freshcoat suggested I input different brightness values from inside the zwavejs2mqtt UI. From inside the zwavejs2mqtt UI all the bulbs transitioned instantly.

Next, @freshcoat suggested I put default in the transition duration “Send Option”

Screenshot 2021-09-14 140314

Once, I put default in the zwavejs2mqtt, all bulbs transitioned slowly.

@freshcoat sums it up better than I can, so I’ll just quote him:

ok, that tells me there’s some weirdness with the bulb firmware. can’t explain why different bulbs with the same version behave differently.(edited)
HA always sends a default duration.
That translate[s] to a different Z-Wave command payload than if you use z2m w/o the duration(edited)
From HA: tell the light to turn on with default duration
From z2m: tell the light to turn on (duration not specified)

Is there any way to have the lights transition consistently?

#2

I’ll just add that HA only recently added duration functionality with their zwave JS calls, so that is why they were instant previously and now have a duration.

In automations and scripts, if you call the light.turn_on service with transition 0 then they will instantly change, but I agree that just toggling the bulb in the front end the duration is a bit slow. I wonder if we can change the default HA duration…