I’ve created a ZigBee group and bound a Blue switch to Hue bulbs. I created the group in Hubitat, but I imagine that’s irrelevant once everything is bound. The switch is in Smart Bulb mode and set to be a Dimmer.
Two issues I’m struggling with:
When turning the switch off the lights blink out instantly. Despite me setting all preferences I can find to do a graceful fade. The bulbs are set to fade over 800ms. The switch is set to fade even longer. If I send “OFF” to the light itself or to the group, the bulbs fade nicely. If I command the switch (physical or via the network) the bulbs go out instantly. The LED fades down nicely, and that looks pretty in the dark
So how do I get the switch is send the same OFF that everybody else sends to the bulbs? I have no ZigBee sniffer to tell me what’s actually being sent. But something must be different.
Much less important: when I dim the light either up or down by holding the paddle, the lights change but then “bounce back” a little the moment I let go. I’m as sure as I can be (limited knowledge and tools) that nothing else is triggering the group. Can a light that reports its level in a group cause the dimmer to set to that level and echo it back to the other lights leaving a race condition for who gets the last laugh?
Here’s the group config. I have another (different switch and bulb) without some of the group device options. AFAICT those are just within Hubitat and don’t relate to the bindings as that exhibits the identical behavior. But I could be wrong. Is there a better place to view the bindings themselves?
NOTE TO FUTURE READERS: Blue switch endpoint is 0x02 and the Hue bulb endpoint is 0x0B. The defaults won’t give an error, but also won’t do anything
Using these bindings I get the graceful OFF that I was after. Thanks!
I still get the “bounce” on level change; not sure where that’s coming from. I’ll dig into that later.
Update: I was able to repro the “bounce” by sending “start level change” / “stop level change” to the bulb directly and got the same behaviour with Hue and Ikea bulbs with two different drivers. So certainly not a switch issue. Still not sure what’s causing it.
A “bounce” on level change from a smart switch is pretty much unavoidable, even in the best-case scenario.
When you hold down the paddle on the smart switch, two things happen: it starts increasing the internally-tracked level of the switch, and it sends a zigbee LevelControl Move command to the bound lights to start doing the same.
Then when you release the paddle, it sends a zigbee LevelControl MoveToLevel command to the value that the internally-tracked level of the switch has reached.
Even if you have all the parameters set the same way, so that the fade is happening at the same speed on both the switch and the light, there’s going to be some variable latency in sending these commands. The bounce comes from the fact that the switch stops increasing its level immediately when you release the paddle, while the bound light keeps going up until it gets the message that the paddle was released. Then the bound light is commanded to set itself to the level of the switch, which is slightly lower, resulting in the “bounce”.
The same happens when dimming down, just in reverse.
