Tasker plugin missing the most 'essential' actions

i’m in disbelief over how rudimentary the tasker plugin appears to be. all that’s allowed is turn on/off, scene or effect. the most basic functionality should include setting brightness level. how could that have been left out? with all the impressive, fancy things you can do with hue lights (and the hue essentials app) i would be satisfied with the most basic turn on/off, set brightness percent and change rudimentary color. i can only have 1 of these? i must be missing something. i’ve read that you can use manual intents instead of the tasker plugin and that would be fine with me, but i can find no command to change the brightness level. is it undocumented?

who doesn’t change the brightness level of their hue lights? the only solution i can see is setting up 100 scenes for every group (another annoyance is that individual lights can’t be targeted, but i can live with that) to set the brightness level from 1 - 100%.

well, i found the answer myself. i was too hasty in reviewing the intents documentation and found this on review:

  • ON (Boolean) - Switch this group on or off. Can be true (on) or false (off).
  • BRIGHTNESS (Integer) - Set the brightness of this group. Value must be between 1 (almost off) and 254 (highest brightness). This will only change the brightness of a light if the light is on. This can be used in combination with the ON extra.

i can use this, but it does make me wonder if i’m also misunderstanding the tasker plugin functionality as well. is it possible to also do this with the tasker plugin which is preferred? thanks.

Hello, thanks for the details. Changing brightness using the Tasker plugin is on the wish list for future development. What exactly would you like to you use the brightness action for in Tasker?

i’ve actually switched to home assistant to handle my hue automations with tasker. i still use your app on my phone as a general replacement for the philips app, but i wanted the extra control functionality with home assistant.

at a minimum i would want to see the following basic automations before reconsidering hue essentials:

  • turn light on/off
  • set light brightness level as a percentage e.g. ‘0’ to ‘100’
  • set light color temperature in kelvins e.g. ‘2700’
  • set light color in rgb value e.g. red ‘FF0000’

would be nice to have:

  • adjust light brightness level up/down as a percentage e.g. ‘-100’ to ‘100’

i would concentrate on implementing this with intents…the plugin gui is visually appealing, but it’s far quicker to use intents and anyone this serious about this level of control will already know how best to employ them.

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Ok, thanks a lot for the detailed feedback. It is on the wish list for future development.

You can now use the Tasker plugin to start an automation (with an external event) in Hue Essentials. In that automation you can add all of the actions you mentioned in your comment above. See for details: Start an automation using Tasker (Android)

In a future update I will make it possible for you to configure these actions directly in the Tasker plugin, instead of using an automation.

Let me know what you think about it.

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