I have been running Smart Bulb mode with Philips Hue and have had great results so far. Let us know how it goes when you do test it out.
Testing Smart Bulb mode has been “interesting” so far. With a neutral present everything has been stable and glitch free no matter what bulb is in use.
Without a neutral things are quite strange. The two dimmers I have installed on non-neutral circuits both do exactly the same thing. For the past week I thought that both might actually be bad dimmers in fact! They were purchased and delivered at the same time within the same order at the very end of the last batch just before stock ran out…
First up lets talk about smart bulb mode with a halogen installed. With a halogen bulb installed that works perfectly when smart bulb mode is disabled upon enabling smart bulb mode, disabling local control, then sending the dimmer to 99 on the device page, the dimmer goes into the familiar reset loop that until now I never experienced with this high of a wattage. Air gap resetting the dimmer breaks the loop and it starts over. However this sometimes it’s different — the reset loop repeats 6–10 times then the dimmer goes to 45% and sits there or the reset loop repeats forever. It’s a 50% chance one way or the other. If it does stabilize then I can set the dimmer to 99 on the device page. Weird!
Next with a Smart Bulb installed all I get is a red blinking LED bar and the bulb itself blinking at a matching pace (approximately once per two seconds). The solid red bar looks like the first phase of the dimmer’s normal boot sequence.
Only these two dimmers exhibit this behavior and both lack a neutral. The rest of my dimmers are solid but all other dimmers in my home have neutral wires. Also high up on the weird-o-meter is that both of these dimmers when set to 99 no matter the other modes/settings are not stable since upgrading to v1.47 no matter what the load – even halogen or incandescent (and I did try a variety of wattages). What I see is a subtle and somewhat random looking pulsation but that never goes away. I did open the panel, reseat the dimmer, check my terminals, etc and everything physically looks good. It only occurs when set to exactly 99. Any other value is stable.
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Can you explain a bit more? Are you using on/off switches or dimmers? Can you use the dimmers to dim the Hues (even if it takes some software config)? What settings are you using on the switches (default level, smart bulb mode, disable relay, etc)?
Either will work (dimmer or on off), but they have to be the red series. I usually set it the device like this:
Dimmer speed - 0
Default Level (both) - 99
Disable Relay
State after power restored - 99
Smart bulb mode - on
Then, in Rule Machine you set the automation to respond to scene commands:
Interesting, thank you!
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To add another data point to “Smart Bulb Mode” with no neutral, I’ve tried this twice on one of my LZW31-SNs running firmware 1.48 and it screwed up the switch so bad both times that I had to factory reset it to get it to work again. No amount of air-gapping or circuit breaking could reset it enough. What I’d see is that even though the switch would talk on the ZWave network (I could still control scenes with it), it wouldn’t respond to anything coming in over ZWave. OZW also would report RTTs in the 2000-5000s. Factory resetting then reincluding in the network would get everything back to normal (with a new node ID, thus requiring updating all of my scripts and automations).
Did you ever find a way to get this working well? I’m having exactly the same problem with my no-neutral dimmers trying to use Hue or Sengled bulbs. Even with 2x aeotec bypasses installed it’s still unstable. Same results on two different dimmers on two different circuits. Trouble with no-neutral smart bulb mode. Red series resets or flickers even with bypass