Maybe it is just me, but even at 10 % my link bulbs seem awful bright. Does anyone else have this or know if anything can be done?
They are in my front porch lights and we just want a soft low light to accent things, but these seem to light up the entire porch.
Perhaps a better option would be lower watt standard leds and a dimming smartthings switch?
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I regularly use levels from 1% to 30%.
I don’t know if the brightness is linear… But as long as SmartThings doesn’t limit dimming to 10% increments, the bulbs are fine.
But 10% increments are currently common, including, admittedly, in the current version SmartTiles (but future SmartTiles will have higher granularity of control).
I just got the V2 hub, so you are saying just be patient and soon I should have options other than 10% increments? (since 10% is the lowest I can go right now, as far as I know)
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Yes… But also log the feature request with Support@SmartThings.com and search for various Community built, free, lighting SmartApps here on the Forum that Developers write with a focus on details like this.
I will chime in and agree that on ST V2 even 1 or 2% is a LOT brighter than it was when I was using Wink ( go ahead and laugh) or Almond+ hubs.
I guess that is a good thing, since I used to leave about 4 of them on at 1% as night lights, but since they are so much brighter now I have gone to actually shutting all the lights off at night . The hall lights @ 1% on PIR at night is enough to blind you.
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@juano2310 - can you help us get 1% added to the Hue and other Lighting apps? I think lots of folks have asked to have an increment lower than 10%.
Separately, for a while there was a defect where setLevel() <7% was stuck at 7%. This was corrected on the Hue and Osram bulbs but I wouldn’t be surprised if it existed elsewhere too (like GE).
Thanks!
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I second that. Would be great to be able to go below 10%. I am using a couple of custom apps because of this and of course no local process because of it.
These lights are hard because Zigbee uses 0-255 as possible values for dim level, so ST does a conversion based on 0-100%. 1% in ST is 25 or 26 to the bulb, so there’s room to go dimmer although who knows how much difference it would make. It’s possible Wink/Almond used the whole range.
I think it was brought up in the past that an exponential conversion might make more sense than a linear one because the perceived brightness difference is stronger at lower dim levels than at 80-100%.
Could easily do this or use a custom slider range 0-255 in a custom devicetype, but it wouldn’t play nice with SmartApps and lose local processing for v2 users.
That actually makes sense, since I thought I was imagining that along with being brighter at low levels, they also seam not as bright at high levels. So it is feasible that what was 1% or 2 % is now 3-5%, and at the other end what was 100% is now only 90-95% when converting from 1/255 to 1/100 .
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Let me check the code but I don’t think I limit it or do increments but it’s true there are some legacy 255 conversions. I will take a look.
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The Cree bulbs are definitely doing a conversion of 0-255
Just look at the set level of 5% that returns a value of 0d or 13. 99% returns 254.
I will try to find who did Cree, I did Hue since I specialize in LAN connected devices 
You guys are starting to lose me with all the technical talk. 
I did find that I can manually dim down to 1% withing smartthings by going directly to each light. I tried this and liked the results.
So I assume that smartthings just needs to allow this option within the smartapp.
Tonight I will have to check again, but I think that the lights are coming on a fair amount higher than 10% that they are set for.Does that sound possible? Maybe related to the 0-225 you guys are speaking of?
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We are doing the conversion for Hue so what I will do is to set bri to 1 if level is 1 and use the conversion for the rest of the values. At least we will have a true 1%. Not sure when this will go out since is a minimal change and we need to get QA involved before publishing.
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Post a beta device type so we can test it and give feedback.
It is on the Service Manager not the device type for Hue. In order to test it you would have to uninstall your current setup and use this one instead.
Got it, thanks for the clarification. Probably doesn’t make a lot of sense for most people then.
I notice the poor dimming with the GE bulbs also but I see it even when they are being “dumb” in a smart dimmer so I’m curious if software will actually fix this. I can show a GE bulb and another LED in the same controlled fixture and the GE is WAY brighter.
GE is very bright, I have them connected to the HUE Bridge and at 1% they are really bright still.
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Maybe it was just a fluke, or maybe I accidentally stumbled on a work around.
2 nights ago, when my smartapp was triggered and the porch lights were on, I went to each bulb on smartthings app and lowered each one down to 1% and they dimmed way down to that. Then last night at sunset when the smartapp triggered again, the bulbs both came on and were both at 1% (even though the smartapp has them set at 10%)
With the hard to manage dials that don’t report % how did you get it to 1%?