So I haven’t been using delay much in flows but today I had a need for it to do a temporary flow. I bought seven Zigbee bulbs for a dinner table lamp and it turned out that I have too many Zigbee devices in my system. After including the bulbs Homey went completely haywire…so I had to delete the bulbs to get the system stable again.
So then I needed to reset the bulbs to return them and the way to do that is frankly ridiculous. The bulbs are Eglo and here is a screenshot of a YouTube video of the sequence required:
I did not feel like doing this for seven bulbs manually, so I quickly created a flow to do it for me. After copying the different time stamps using delay I realised that 1 second delay gives about 3 seconds action in Homey. 6 second delay gives about 9 seconds and 12 seconds about 15.
So I had to do the 1 second periods without any delay, the 6 second with a 3 second delay and the 12 second 9 second delay. It should be stated that I used a 433 MHz plug for this and other types of plugs might be faster…but I could follow the progress in the flow and it was obvious that the strings between the cards (and the cards themself) add considerable time.
I have not decided if I think this is bad or not. I do realise that visually this is needed when watching the flow progress and also that there might be technical reasons for not sending the command immediately…but this makes the time number in the delay card misleading. You can never trust that the number you chose in a delay card will correspond with the delay period delivered.
What do you mean by too many ZigBee devices? There’s a maximum to the devices directly connected to Homey, but the routers (mains powered ZigBee devices) extend the signal. AFAIK there’s no maximum number of devices in the ZigBee network, only the devices that aren’t connected via a router.
You can also reset the EGLO Connect.Z bulbs from the mobile app (they have both a ZigBee and a BLE radio inside), so you need to install the “AwoX HomeControl“ app on your phone and add the bulbs there (also works even when they’re already on ZigBee). You can reset them afterwards.
This thread is about the delay card in Homey, so we shouldn’t discuss Zigbee network or Eglo bulbs here. The bulbs are reseted and put in their packaging to be returned to Amazon.
Also starting the Flow Execution in the left overview of Flows works as Execute and not a a Test like pressing the TEST button or Test From here on the canvas.
Edit:
Re-reading
It is about the visualisation… so Testing - not the normal executing a flow.
I count 57 seconds in your flow above, but your flow also measures the execution of the Light App.
ideal you should also remove these and chain the Delay cards. (I also didn’t do that in my test above )
despite that, the delay card in flows is still pretty accurate imho.
That’s interesting…I did not know that. So if I had used say a remote as a trigger instead of the play button in the flow itself the slow animation of the strings between the cards would not have happened and the delays would have been much more accurate?
The bulbs are Eglo and here is a screenshot of a YouTube video of the sequence required:
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