"Powered Off" overlapping segments don't let lower segments "shine through"?

Issues
1

I am new to WLED; my first project uses 0.15.0 (2412100).
I have two segments; the default Segment 0 set to an effect across the whole strip, and an overlapping Segment 1 that encompasses the four LEDs that are positioned above my front door.

I want to change the color of those four LEDs to white with Home Assistant when my camera detects motion in the area, and then back to “whatever they were” after motion stops + a short delay.

When Segment 1 is turned On, it works as expected. Those four LEDs turn white.
When Segment 1 is turned Off, it forces those four LEDs to turn off, instead of letting the effect from Segment 0 “pass through”.

This also has some weird effects on the Glitter overlay. When Glitter is set up as the effect for Segment 1 with Overlay enabled, and then Segment 1 is turned “Off” - the animation continues but actually causes the LEDs that would have flickered the Glitter color to flicker off! (brightness 0)

Previous comments across this board and elsewhere seem to indicate that at one point, perhaps in an older version of WLED, the behaviour was that the “lower” segment would shine through when a higher segment is Off.

Am I correct in observing that this is no longer the case?

The only way I can figure out how to achieve this, at least in the WLED UI, is to click the “(un)Freeze” button on Segment 1.

The trouble with this is that it’s not easy (or possible?) to control with HA, since the HA integration offers no control over the Freeze/Unfreeze state of the Segment (although I see it’s in the JSON API).

I’d also ultimately like to be able to toggle these four LEDs between white and “whatever the underlying effect is” using HA, without having to care what preset is or was enabled in the past, which means knowing nothing about what the Segment ID is, since some presets may have more segments than others. Any suggestions on how to accomplish this?

2

I think the issue you’re running into is the concept of “overlaying” segments.

They way that’s handled has evolved from earlier revisions, even to the point that some effects now have an “Overlay checkbox”.

That may or may not help you as some effects don’t have that option.

As far as handling what you “know works” (freeze/unfreeze), you should be able to create a very simple preset that just freezes or unfreezes a particular segment.

A preset that contains only:
{"seg":[{"id":1,"frz":true}]}

Will freeze segment#1 and

{"seg":[{"id":1,"frz":false}]}

will unfreeze it (and do nothing else).

You should be able to fire those via HA as required.

3

Just a guess, but does it work if you don’t save the overlapped segment with state? (delete “on”:true and/or “on”:false from the preset’s api)