Govee H6056 Gotchas

When working with Govee Flow Plus light bars (H6056), remember:

• Segments 12, 13, 14 are phantom. API returns 200 OK, nothing lights. Physical range is 0..11 only. Never send commands targeting 12+.
• Two physical bars = one API device. The bar-to-segment mapping is:
  • Yankee (call it the "top bar" or whichever you've labeled): segments 0..5
  • Golf (the other bar): segments 6..11
  • Within each bar, segment[0] is at the TOP — natural index order is top-down. Bottom-up fill = high-to-low index range.
• Discovery is GET /router/api/v1/user/devices with header Govee-API-Key. Not mDNS, not Bluetooth, not BLE.
• Capability name is verbose: devices.capabilities.segment_color_setting / segmentedColorRgb. rgb is a packed int: (r << 16) or (g << 8) or b.
• Rate limit reality: ~7 req/min sustained is the measured ceiling. Burst-tolerant for short windows. Pair with iot-actuator-patterns-kotlin (or its rate-limited-iot-debounce predecessor) if you're emitting more than one update per second. min-interval 1.2 s is the sweet spot.
• rgb=(0,0,0) is unreliable as "off". Some firmware paths treat packed RGB 0x000000 as a no-op and silently retain the prior segment state. To reliably clear a segment, use rgb=(1,1,1) (near-black but non-zero). On session shutdown, always issue an explicit all-segments command to every physical segment (0..11) so nothing is left lit when the script exits.

See the full skill at skills/govee-h6056-control/SKILL.md for the Kotlin/Ktor reference client.