Lighting Effects

[rmjb]

My only hub is the v3 hub. I have a few smart bulbs connected.

I see other smart lighting platforms, like Hue, WiZ, Govee and others can do lighting effects, but you need to go in on those platforms.

If I only use SmartThings and have bulbs connected via Zigbee or Matter, what lighting effects can I do? I know there’s circadian lighting, but I think that is it.

[mocelet]

SmartThings does not provide lighting effects, it doesn’t even provide support for vendor scenes.

However, you can use virtual switches connected to Google Home to, indirectly, activate scenes of WiZ and, I guess, Govee and others. It’s what I use for my WiZ scenes.

If that’s not an option or you want it fully local you’ll have to build your own effect, but that can be cumbersome. And if you want something smooth like the native dynamic modes where the colour is constantly changing in a seamless way you’ll have to use custom drivers. Stock drivers can’t do Zigbee / Matter colour transitions.

Should you follow the build your own effect path…

For Zigbee lights, you can use this driver, I’ve not tested it since I don’t have Zigbee lights but many users have.

(EDGE Driver-Mc): Zigbee Light Multifunction Mc

(NEW RELEASE) Version 6.0 of the Edge Driver Zigbee Light Multifunction Mc Changes and Improvements: At the request and tested by @milandjurovic71, I have added new modes of Continuous color change, using 2 contiguous colors or with a unique color, blue or green. IMPORTANT NOTE: All color change modes are executed in the driver and are not programmed in the device, therefore continuous use or in more than one device at the same time can condition the operation of the hub and the network, since with the frequency of the chosen timer commands are executed, sent and received continuously. [Screenshot_20220603-150544] Added capability for information of the signal metric as in the last Hop. By default in history you don’t see the events. In preferences you can enable visibility if you…

For Matter lights you can use my driver, I tested the colour animations of the examples in WiZ and IKEA lights. The driver offers the tools to build transitions and control the randomization of colours so you can have some fun looping them.

[Edge] Matter Playground

New update 2025-11-11 brings the foundation for dynamic colour animations! I’m not especially fan of distracting animations but I do enjoy when the scene doesn’t feel static and smoothly changes over time, even if it’s just a subtle animation that gravitates towards the same colour. The Advanced input already had the tools to create colour animations, for instance: hue 60 sat 100 seconds 15 will transition to a nice blue shade. hue 80 sat 100 seconds 15 will do the same to a purple colour. Loop those two actions with virtual switches or my scene switcher and you have a perfectly smooth blue-purple animation. And a boring one since it feels dull and repetitive! [area color static] Let’s make it more dynamic! For that I’ve added a saturation randomizer, randomSat min-max, so you can…

[rmjb]

Thanks! I only have Zigbee lights and I used the driver you linked and it works, I now have some lighting effects.

Embedding this feature in a driver isn’t the best way to interact with the feature though, it would be much better to have it exposed as one of the “Services” is the Life tab. Are those open to developers on this forum? Or is it only Samsung than can create those Services?

[mocelet]

@rmjb

Embedding this feature in a driver isn’t the best way to interact with the feature though

Offering a good quality colour animation is complicated if the light itself does not have the effects or, at the very least, is able to do colour transitions. After all, cool animations are the ones where the light is constantly changing.

For cloud based lights woud be a waste of cloud resources constantly sending commands to lights. That’s why their “dim gradually” updates the light every 1 minute which is everything but gradual. Imagine the kind of animation you would get if each colour change took a minute.

For local lights, the only one being able to use the native features of the light for best performance is the driver.

That’s why I don’t see SmartThings offering “emulated effects” as a standard feature. However, they could certainly work with vendors like WiZ, Hue, Nanoleaf, Govee, etc. to make their own native effects available through SmartThings. They could also expose Zigbee/Matter native transitions in stock drivers and improve the user interface. They could even facilitate creating loops in routines or rules API that are easy to initiate / stop without creating virtual devices.