Lighting
Your lights live on the Lighting tab of the Habitation dashboard, and you can put a compact control for any of them on your Home screen as well. See Home layouts.
On the Lighting tab
Every light gets a card: its name, a power button, and a brightness slider across the middle. A light that can do colour also carries a row of six colours with a palette button at the end. Tap one of the six to go straight to it, or tap the palette for a colour wheel, where hue runs around the rim and the colours grow paler towards the middle, so anything the strip can do is one tap away. A warm-to-cool light gets that slider instead.
Groups sit at the top of the tab and individual lights underneath. To put the cards in the order you want, press and hold one until it lifts, drag it, and let go. Your order is kept, and a light added afterwards joins the end rather than disappearing into an order made before it existed. The wide panels, such as the relay strip, stay where they are.
Light groups
A light group is a set of lights you drive as one. Make a group for the lights over the table, or for everything in the living area, and it behaves exactly like a single light: one power button, one brightness slider, one colour. Anything that takes a light takes a group, so a group can go into a scene, into a routine, or onto your Home screen.
To make one, tap the + on any light's card. You get the groups that light could join, and a box at the bottom to name a new one. Type a name, tap Create, and the group starts with that light in it.
To change one, tap the gear on the group's own card. It lists what is in the group with Remove beside each, and the rest of your lights underneath with Add. Delete group takes the group away and leaves every light exactly as it was. You are asked twice, because there is no undo.
Turning a group on turns on everything in it, and the group reads as on while any one of its lights is on. A group offers only the controls its lights have in common: put a colour light and a plain white one together and you get brightness alone, because that is all both can manage. On warm-to-cool the slider is limited to the range every member can actually reach, so it can never ask one of them for a setting it cannot produce.
Only lights can be in a group. A lighting circuit wired straight to a relay channel is an on/off switch rather than a light, with no brightness or colour to share, so it is not offered. A group cannot contain another group.
Lights fed from a relay
If a light's controller is fed from one of your relay channels, its card has one power button that does both jobs. Tap it on and the relay comes on first, then the light once the controller has started; tap it off and the light goes off and the relay is cut. There is no separate standby button to find.
Two settings change how that works. Open Settings, choose the Devices tab, and expand the controller. Both appear on every lighting controller, whether or not you have given it a relay channel yet.
Power-On Delay is how long the controller is given to wake up after the relay closes, before Sensa tells the light to come on. It ships at 0.5 seconds, which suits most controllers. If you tap a light on, the button lights up, and the strip stays dark until you tap a second time, the controller is taking longer than that to start. Raise the delay a little at a time until the first tap works every time. Anything from 0 to 10 seconds is allowed, and a new value is used on the very next tap, with nothing to rebuild and nothing to restart.
Leave Relay On decides what switching the light off does to the supply. Left off, which is how it ships, the relay is cut along with the light, so a van standing on its batteries draws nothing at all through that channel. Turn it on and the light goes off while the supply stays live, so the controller stays awake and the next tap is instant. It suits a light you use constantly while you are aboard, and it is the wrong choice for a van left parked up.
Light Type
A multi-mode LED controller can drive several different kinds of strip: plain white, tunable white, or full colour. Which one it is set to is chosen on the controller itself, usually with a match button, and the strip on the other end is the thing nothing on the network can see.
Sensa works it out for you. The controller tells us which mode it is in, and the card then shows the right controls: a brightness slider alone for a white strip, a warm-to-cool slider for tunable white, and a full colour picker for a colour strip.
An addressable (pixel) controller such as the Skydance WZ-SPI drives a colour strip by definition, so it has no Light Type to set. What it needs instead is described under Addressable strips.
Correcting it yourself
If what you see does not match the strip on the wall, open Settings, choose the Devices tab, expand the controller, and set Light Type.
It sits on Auto by default, which is the answer the controller gave. Setting it to a mode yourself overrides that, so use it when the controls are wrong for the strip you actually fitted.
On a Skydance 5-in-1 controller the modes are named after the colour its RUN LED shows, so you can match what the dropdown says to the light on the unit itself:
| Mode | RUN LED | Controls you get |
|---|---|---|
| DIM | White | Brightness |
| CCT | Yellow | Brightness and warm to cool |
| RGB | Red | Full colour |
| RGBW | Green | Full colour |
| RGB+CCT | Blue | Full colour |
The device row shows a small coloured dot matching the mode the controller is in, so you can check it at a glance without opening anything.
If Sensa does not recognise your controller
These controllers are re-manufactured in batches, and a new batch sometimes identifies itself in a way we have not seen before. When that happens Sensa cannot tell which mode it is in, and the controls it shows may not match your strip.
You will see a line in your Log naming the controller and what it reported. Set the Light Type yourself and your lights work normally. Send us the message and we will add the new batch in a future update, so the next system finds it on its own.
A controller from an unknown batch still appears in the Devices list, marked ZIGBEE?, and can be added. Because Sensa cannot tell which mode it is in, the Light Type on its row offers the five modes from the table above so you can say which it is. Pick the one matching the colour of the controller's RUN LED.
Addressable strips
A pixel strip has to be told two things before it lights correctly: the order it expects its colours in, and the type of chip driving each pixel. Both are printed on the reel or buried in a datasheet, so rather than asking you for them, Sensa asks which strip you fitted and sets both.
Open Settings, choose the Devices tab, expand the controller, and set LED Strip Profile. Each profile is named after the strip and carries the product code printed on the reel, so match the code. The profiles in this release are:
- Standard, the controller's own defaults, which suit most plain RGB strips
- LEDspace Splash Addressable RGB (SPLASH12T-SPI)
- LEDSpace RGBW 12mm (LINE12-PX-RGBW-24V)
Beneath it, Light Bead Sequence and Chip Type show what the profile has set, and you can change either by hand if your strip is not listed. The usual sign of a wrong setting is not wrong colours but part of the strip staying dark, most often the first few pixels.
Number of Pixels is separate from the profile, because it depends on how long a run you cut rather than which strip it is. It ships at 60. If the far end of a longer strip never lights, drag the slider up until it does.
If your strip is not in the list, tell us its product code and we will add it in a future update.
Effects
A pixel controller has a set of built-in animations, and the card offers them in an Effect dropdown. Pick one and the strip runs it.
None sits at the top of that list, and it is how you stop one. Picking it puts the strip back to a plain colour, or to plain white on a white strip. Choosing a colour yourself, or a white setting on a white strip, stops an animation as well, and the dropdown then reads None on its own. It tells you what the strip is doing now rather than which animation last ran.
The Effect dropdown is on the light's full card on the Lighting tab and on its compact control on the Home screen, and the two always agree.