Implement Color Slider for Milight RGBW LEDs

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I am not sure how many of you use Milight LEDs or are interested in buying some. For sure, IWY Master and WIFI370 provide the better technical solution, but Milight has a much lower price tag. One of the downsides of Milight is the limited color control. It only provides 255 presets for hue, 19 presets for brightness, and absolutely no saturation control.

The intent is to support Milight as part of pimatic-led-light which currently provides a RGB color picker. See also http://forum.pimatic.org/topic/332/plugin-for-wifi-controlled-led-light-iwy-light

I have implemented a Milight adapter for the RGB color picker on a dev-branch, but the user experience is pretty average imho. Therefore, this is to suggest an alternative UI adapter (as part of pimatic-led-light) for Milight devices. The UI shall simply consist of a brightness slider (DimmerDevice with value 0 used for Off) and a Milight-specific Color Slider with 256 values, where 0…255 is used for the color presets and 256 for white mode. To give you a better idea of it I have drafted a prototype of the color slider - see https://jsfiddle.net/WittigMarcus/p0xw0jks/

Note, the Milight color wheel is completely different from the HSV color circle! See image below. This feature request is to get your feedback and to get an idea how many potential Milight users we have on board

Currently using your branch of pimatic-led-light and agree in using your alternative adapter.

@bjornhij Thanks, for your feedback!

Apparrently, we only have three Milight users as part of the pimatic community. This may change, as the community is still very small, but growing quickly.

If the pimatic-led-light plugin is not moving forward within the next few weeks I may implement a simple version of the color slider - possibly in cooperation with @Fjux using pimatic-milight.

@mwittig can you add color slider to homeduino? or make support in pilight homeduino rf?

@lcf_m said:

@mwittig can you add color slider to homeduino? or make support in pilight homeduino rf?

If I’ll do the the color slider for Milight I am happy to do this for homeduino RF as well. The color wheel is different, however, and also the number of color presets to choose from may vary - just 32 for the RF device you have, right?

@mwittig no, only 5bit per color (

@mwittig This looks really nice!

only downside of this is that you cannot preselect a color.
but not sure how this is a downside (perhaps with a option for the user to switch between this mode, and a same slider idea but with all the color values already put in?

this weekend i have some extra free time again, so i will be looking into to milight implementations again!
last few weeks were extremely busy @ work…

@Fjux Why not adding a drop down with a list of colors the user choose from. I think 7 colors are enough as the color rendition of the Milight bulbs is pretty average (blue, turquoise, green, yellow, orange, red, magenta, lilac).

The color-slider I did is just a proof of concept and needs more work, but it should be straightforward to integrate with Pimatic

@Fjux Please also note the Color Slider has not received any votes yet!

Just voted. I really cant wait for a colorslider in the mobile frond end. If its available i want to add it to the mysensors plug-in. All the colorslider needs to do is getting a hex color code.

@sweebee Thanks for up-voting. Apparently we need different flavors of the color slider:

• Milight Color Slider for the 255 color presets following the Milight color circle
• RGB Color Slider
• 32 color slider for the 433 Mhz LED RF requested by @lcf_m

@mwittig said:

@sweebee Thanks for up-voting. Apparently we need different flavors of the color slider:

• Milight Color Slider for the 255 color presets following the Milight color circle
• RGB Color Slider
• 32 color slider for the 433 Mhz LED RF requested by @lcf_m

isn’t it easyer to create 1 complete colot slider, but perhaps with an option to calculate how much colors the device can handle?
Even if it is only an option set in a plugin?

Or perhaps make it normal RGB, but for 255 colors, let the plugin calculate the closest RGB value it actually can display.

Or do you want to make complete different designs for those 3?

@Fjux I think the color slider should be as simple as possible. As it is possible to set a scale for the normal slider (min and max value) the different color sliders can be defined via css. The slider animation however is different as it maps slider value to a color which depends on the color model of the underlying device. However, rather than doing an animated slider it is probably fancy enough to use a color scale background suitable for the underlying device (can be set via css).

With respect to RGB it is questionable whether or not it make sense to select the full range of RGB color values using the slider. I think it is better to use the HSV or HSB color circle and set the hue degree on the circle (360 color values). I think this is basically what the slider as part of the color picker (as part of pimatic-led-light) is doing. The rest of the color rendition is brightness (or value) and saturation (x and y axis of the color picker)

The best option is to retrieve the rgb value, eg 255.14.130. This is easy to calculate to different values for devices.

Is there any progress on this? I am planning to build a plugin for an Blinkstick Pro and need an colorpicker.

@tester22 Yes, but slowly as my time is limited right now

@mwittig I made some changes to piratic-led-light so it supports blinkstick now: https://github.com/tester22/pimatic-led-light So from my point of view this is enough for me.

@tester22 Great. So, I guess you are happy with RGB color picker as provided with pimatic-led-light.