Expanded Notification / Effects

I stumbled on this post when searching for similar suggestions and I like the sound of queued notifications that cycle, but I can’t find any reference to that existing for blue series switches.

Sending multiple effects to have them all displayed in sequence would be cool, and I have another wishlist feature for effects: Multicolor.

Honestly I’m really surprised I couldn’t find anyone asking for this already cause it seemed like such a no brainer to me. In fact, I was quite surprised to find I couldn’t do it when I got my switches. Obviously, full control a la WLED would be awesome, but if that’s too complex to fit in the integrated firmware, I have a simple(r) suggestion.

Effect Background Color - Any effect that has one color + off (with blink/pulse/whatever) could instead have effect color and background color. Background color, if set, replaces the off portion of the effect. So for example, green blink with red background would alternate red and green instead of just blinking green with off in between blinks.

Potential parameters:
effect_background_color (optional, defaults to match effect_color if not set)
effect_background_level (optional, defaults to 0 if not set, 0 = off = maintain old behaviour)

I am all on board for WLED, especially with the blues having the individually addressable LED’s. I know I brought it up before, and I’m pretty sure it turned out not to be possible.

Now as for queuing notifications, while it may not be possible through the switch’s firmware, this should absolutely be possible through an automation on whatever home automation system you use.

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8 agree the queueing is less desirable as a built in feature and is fairly easy to accomplish through other means. I only brought it up because of that older post saying it was a thing they were doing.

Multi-color is what I really want. My goal is to know at a glance important information through a less intrusive method than phone or TTS notifications. Color is the most noticeable at a glance and there are only so many to go around. I already had some multi color LED chips available in a few places and had set up a few notifications on there. A slow green pulse means a 3D print job is finished, and a solid green with a red flash means the machine has errored and needs attention.

In trying to get this effect going on the switches as well, I ran into the multicolor problem. I did devise a way to do the green and red notification, but due to a lot of decisions I made for good reasons in the back end of that code, the update period is a little too long for this to work nicely. I don’t really want to go with queueing because they either have to cycle very fast or I’m liable to miss one unless I stand there watching the switch do its thing for a few seconds. Either way, I’m in to that intrusive territory again.

I started a similar thread earlier about wanting to be able to customize notifications: Custom Zigbee Notification Animation (Loop).

It never really got much traction. But I suspect that some of the issue is that we still don’t have any way to contribute to firmware development. See this discussion: Use the community to help with development - #12 by wbyoung.

And finally, maybe a bit off topic, but I just got this integration into HACS which I’m using for controlling notifications across multiple switches in my house simultaneously: Lampie: Notifications on Multiple Switches for Home Assistant.

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Neat integration! I built something similar but using NodeRED as the management/coordination. I’m using Z2M, so I’ll probably stick with what I have as it’s already working. I also wrote in a way to display multiple notifications at once by using individual LEDs instead of the entire bar.

One thing I noticed is your docs claim the default maximum duration is 254 seconds, but I don’t think that’s correct. Unless the Z2M description is incorrect, the maximum time (not including indefinitely) is 134 hours.

This should be correct.

Oh, hmm… I guess I don’t know how the 0-255 values map to actual durations. I think I based it (at some point) off of what I saw in the interface that ZHA gives for sending notifications. I’ll go back and look again.

If anyone has a quick reference for the zigbee parameters for this, I’d appreciate it. I always have a hard time finding them. I think I only ever found anything on this community site & nothing official.

Here’s a screenshot of the Z2M interface.

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Thanks, I found another source stating the same here: Control LED color beyond 255 seconds - #5 by PJF.

I’ll update what I implemented & documented. Thanks!

ETA: In case anyone ends up back here and reading this discussion, this was fixed in Lampie v0.2.3.