LIFX Lan Protocol app and drivers for Hubitat Elevation

About

LIFX is quite a complex system to integrate into Hubitat so it's not as simple as just installing a single driver

There are several components

• The LIFX Master App - this is where you discover devices
• Various LIFX device handlers
  • LIFX Color
  • LIFXPlus Color
  • LIFX White
  • LIFX Day and Dusk
  • LIFX Tile - dummy driver, only supports on/off
  • LIFX Multizone - for Beam and Strip

Installation

LIFX Master App

On the Apps Code page, press the New App button

Paste the code for LIFXMasterApp.groovy and press the Save button (or type Ctrl-S)

Individual device handlers

On the Devices Code page, press the New Driver button

Paste the code for LIFXColor.groovy and save

Repeat this process for each of the device handlers you want to install. It's probably best to add all of them even if you don't have a corresponding device at the moment, I've found that buying LIFX devices is a bit addictive.

Create the app

On the Apps page press the Add User App button then click on LIFX Master in the list of available apps.

####IMPORTANT: don't forget to press the Done button to make sure the the LIFX Master app sticks around.

Device discovery

First of all, make sure that all your LIFX devices are powered on, obviously discovery won't find any device that doesn't have power.

Again IMPORTANT if you didn't press the Done button when you created the LIFX Master app then do it now.

Open the LIFX Master app and press the Discover devices button. You may notice the LIFX Discovery device in your list of devices, but this should disappear at the end of the scan.

Updating

Always make a backup.

When the drivers/app have been updated I'll post a message on the Hubitat forum.

To update a device or the app just open the corresponding code,

1. click the Import button at the top of the window
2. a dialog should open with the URL prefilled - click its Import button
3. click OK on the override dialog that should have appeared
4. click the Save button

I normally open the code for each app and device driver in a new tab, then for each tab I'll just do the import (steps 1-3) then once the code has been updated I'll go through the tabs one at a time clicking save and then closing that tab.

While this is happening, you may find some errors appearing in the log if I've made significant changes. Only be concerned if you see errors after all the drivers and the app have been updated.

Implementation information

The LIFX Lan Protocol uses UDP messages, it seems that sometimes these can be missed or lost, so the discovery process makes 5 passes over your local network to try to mitigate this. So far this seems good enough on my network.

Further to this, when a command is sent to change a LIFX setting it requests an acknowledgement and the sequence number is tracked with the LAN Protocol packet. When a subsequent command or query is sent it checks to see whether the acknowledgement was received. If it wasn't received the packet is sent one more time. The reason for this is that UDP messages are not guaranteed to arrive, so it's pretty much a small safety net. You can expect that this will happen at least when the device is next polled (under a minute).

Using the Multizone capabilities

The multizone driver provides a generic setZones command. This accepts an input in the following format: 0:"[hue: 30, brightness: 100, saturation: 100, kelvin: 3500]", 1:"[hue: 0, brightness: 100, saturation: 0, kelvin:3500"] an entry can be submitted for each zone you want to update, and can contain any combination of parameters - e.g. if you only want to update hue and saturation, you can specify only those values, and the brighness and kelvin values for that zone will remain the same. Likewise, you can omit any zones that you do not want to update. As an alternate to specific HBSK values, you can specify any of the defined namedColors or an RGB hex value using 0:"[color: 'Red']", 1:"[color: '#0000FF']"

An additional capability is the creation of child devices for each zone. The corresponding child device can be updated/set like a typical RGBW bulb, and it will update/set the zone in the parent multizone device. If the parent device is updated directly, it will update its children on the next polling interval (1 min).

NOTES:

• After creating the child devices, I've found you have to toggle a few things before they start updating the parent properly - e.g. flip the "switch" on, off, and on again. Will see if this can be addressed in a future update.

Troubleshooting

Undiscovered devices

If you find that some devices aren't discovered

• try the Discover new only new devices button
• make sure that the missing devices still have power - someone may have turned off a switch :)
• try altering some of the options as described below.

With recent improvements I've found that the default settings should be more than enough to discover all your devices in two passes, but your mileage may vary.

My first recommendation would be increasing the value of Time between commands (milliseconds).
Try increasing it by 10 at a time.

You can also increase Maximum number of passes to give discovery a better chance of reaching all the devices in your network. I've found that all my devices are found in the first pass at least 95% of the time.

Errors in the log

Let me know if you see any errors in the log, and I'll do my best to fix the issue as soon as possible

Limitations

I have assumed that you will be running a Class C network (also known as /24), ie that your subnet mask is 255.255.255.0, which limits you to a total of 254 IP addresses.

Note that this uses the IP address as the device network id - if you change the id you may break things. If you don't assign fixed IP addresses to your LIFX devices then you may be able to use this to avoid having to scan for new devices.