Modification of polling interval & some questions about kelvin HOT 1 CLOSED

Hi Adam,

thanks for using Kelvin and for your kind words! Glad you like it!

All of your five assumptions above are correct! BUT, as you already suspected, the design and implementation of the Hue API is actually not very stable. Here are a few things I noticed while I worked on Kelvin:

• There is a noticeable lag between the light bulbs and the bridge on the zigbee layer. (Especially if lights appear or disappear)
• If you set a precise state via the API the resulting state of the bulbs can differ significantly
• The precision of the bulb state differs from model to model and feature to feature (for example XY-colors seem to be more precise than color temperature)

Kelvin tries to work around these quirks by doing a fuzzy comparison of all values that get set or read (for the curious have a look at the equals method in lightstate.go). The downside of this fuzzy state handling are the is unexpected behaviour you observed... :-(

Now to your questions:

• The current polling interval is one second
• The current transition time for new states is also one second (both defined in light.go lines 59 and 60)
• You can quickly reactive Kelvin for any light via the webinterface or it's API (PUT http://{IP}:8080/lights/{lightID}/activate). (NOTE: The webinterface is currently considered beta and has to be enabled in the configuration file, see README)
• Another way to quickly enable Kelvin would be via scenes once this has been implemented (see #9)

To conclude here are a few tips to get Kelvin working as expected:

• Always update to the latest firmware of the bridge and the lights (Especially the lights were updated three weeks ago for the first time in years! I really hope this fixes some of the observed issues... Haven't done much testing yet)
• Don't change your light state to rapidly. As mentioned I poll every second and there is a delay between the bridge and the lights... In my experience you should wait 3-5 seconds after every action (for example: Turn light off, wait 5 seconds, turn light on -> Kelvin should take over)

Hope this helps. If not, feel free to ask! If you like dig into the code! PRs are always welcome! ;-)

from kelvin.