I do have a lot of tunable white (dmx) things in use.
a. Since I do often control lights with home kit commands.
I was wondering if there is a nice way, to control tunable whites with like it is possible with hue bulbs directly connected with homekit via hue bridge (f.e. Command: Change Color Temperature to Warm White)???
…I am not looking for a dirty hack with virtuell items, where rules translate values…
b. As an open discussion:
Tunable whites becoming more and more popular.
OpenHab does not support tunable white items.
Wouldn’t it be useful to have items that works for tunable whites or
maybe adjust the color item to support different tunable things.
… RGB+W, RGB+CCT are available as well.
For bindings that support dealing with color temperature, typically a Dimmer Item is used with warm being near 0 and cool being near 100. I believe that is how the Hue binding handles it.
I use hue lamps without the hue bridge but using alexa through openhab. It works very much the same feeling as the original hue way.
The light is 0…100 and alexa is sending a number, e.g. “cold white” = 0, “warm white” = 88; The exact numbers are specific to the lamps you use, so for hue I found in the openhab alexa binding documentation
alexa=“ColorTemperatureController.colorTemperatureInKelvin” [range=“2200:6500”]
I think there is also a setting for Philips Hue (and other popular brands) directly instead of the range numbers.
What we actually miss is a nice graphical representation for this. I’m not yet happy with mine (and prefere speech commands anyhow).
My personal opinion is a fuzzy logic control would be enough, just giving you 5 values (buttons) like alexa (warmer white, warm white, white, dayight white, cold white)
I am not talking about Hue bulbs in specific. In my case I use DMX. But thats not the point
For Homekit: I am talking about a way where I can say change the color to warm white and it is linked to 1 single item, like it is working for the color item. And not generating multible items to address the missing features and generate workarounds like a number item. Its fine for me to tell SIRI to adjust the color temperature to “15” as translation for coldwhite, but the WAF is not very good for this case. But it seems like this feature is just not availbale (yet) in OpenHab.
In General: I am missing a nice interface for tunable white bulbs like @FSchubert also mentioned. Thats why I asked if OpenHab needs a feature like “tunable white item” or the color item should be adjusted to be more general. For types like: color, tunable white, color + white, color + tunable white (all those types becomming more and more popular)
I do understand your point. New Item types get proposed from time to time.
Here, a Color type Item can be regarded as an enhancement or extension of a simple Dimmer type (with more complex state).
The proposed Color-with-white would essentially be a further enhancement, with another umm sub-state property and more commands.
People can make a very similar case for a new Rollershutter-with-variable-slats type Item.
I’m pretty sure “the project” is resistant to adding change and complexity to OH for the sake of it. Bear in mind a new Item type means new command and state objects to handle throughout openHAB - not just the core framework, but just about every binding, persistence service, various UIs, configuring handlers.
Not that “it can’t be done” - but you need a good case.
For what it is worth, I think there is a good case. At this time, it would likely get pushed off to OH3 development, quite logically.
Long previous ramble through this country -
My personal opinion is that warm should be left and cold should be right.
And I still miss a rule to use the switch (the bulb) to set the brightness back to the same value where it was switched off. Well, should also go back to that very value, when I switch off with alexa.
On requesting a new item type: You have the zigbee light protocol specs that is agreed on by big companies from all over the world. If they decided to give as 0…100 for brightness and 0…100 for color temperature, that’s what we have. Please note, I havn’t read the zigbee specs at all and I am not certain, that we have those value in that way at all!
