I’ve been looking for quite a long time for a switch than can control both Philips hue bulbs and dumb bulbs.
My setup consists of floor standing lamps that are always connected to power, and also dumb bulbs that would need to have some sort of smart switch like this.
I see this one has a smart bulb mode, but my question is if that mode is off, can it both do the on/off/dimming to the hardwired bulbs AND the dimming to the Phillips bulbs via zigbee?
Also, I’m not really familiar with stuff outside of HomeKit and Phillips Hue. What else would I need to get to get these into my ecosystem? I have homepods, the Phillips hue bridge, and a pi running scrypted/homebridge, but have no experience with smartthings/homeassistant/etc.
Thanks.
If the bulbs are not on the same circuit (i.e., if dimming/switching the switch doesn’t affect the Hue bulbs — and it sounds like in you’re case it doesn’t), then you should be good. Your bulbs that are directly wired through this dimmer will dim and switch based on physical paddle actions or commands from your hub, and then you have a couple options for making the smart bulbs work. One is responding to the tap/hold/release actions on the switch and using some automation on your hub to manipulate the Hue bulbs, just like you could if smart bulb mode were enabled. (The difference here is that you aren’t enabling it because you still need it to control the actual circuit you’re connected to, which is undesirable if they were actually smart bulbs and is what this feature was aimed at.)
That’s not the only option, but it depends on what you want. Say the Blue Series was sent a command from your hub, not a physical press on the paddle. Do you still want the Hue bulbs to respond and match? If so, maybe set up some sort of “mirroring” automation on your hub. You could also use Zigbee binding to directly tie the two together without putting a hub in the middle, which may be faster and more reliable, though less powerful if you don’t always want the same thing to happen. I don’t think there’s a way to configure that without a hub, but it wouldn’t require it for regular operation after that, with the main advantage being it would still work if the hub were down for some reason. I’m not sure I’d recommend using the Blue Series (or any Inovelli product) without a hub at all.
That brings up another question since it doesn’t sound like you have a hub: are you looking to set one up? I’m not sure they were able to make it work directly with a Hue Bridge, though I know that was an original goal. Anything like Home Assistant, SmartThings, Hubitat, etc. should work, though I’m not sure I’d recommend SmartThings at this time (I moved to Hubitat and am pretty happy, and lots of people here also like Home Assistant; ST is in a bit of a transitional period now but has historically had too much cloud dependence for my liking). A HomePod alone won’t work because it can’t do Zigbee, and I’m not sure an Echo or similar device would be powerful enough (and still needs the cloud) even though some of them can. Anyway, I think you’ll get the best experience if you have some hub, and I’m not sure Hue is enough at the moment (though you can integrate that with most of these other hub options — my Hue bulbs are on a Bridge integrated with many devices on my Hubitat hub, for example, and I have everything from motion sensors to Lutron Picos to Inovelli Red Series switches and dimmers controlling them).
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