Is there a way to natively activate scenes in HA for white series 2-1 dimmers? I don’t see a button for double and triple taps. I do see a “pressed twice” event on up and down paddle in logs when I try it, but I don’t see that as an option for automation. I’m new to HA so maybe an obvious solution I am missing.
Did you add Jay’s most awesome “Inovelli Matter Switch Tap Sequences” blueprint to your HA instance???
https://github.com/jay-kub/inovelli-matter-switch-tap-sequences
No. I saw it but was just curious if there was a more native and straightforward way to do it. I used Smartthings with the first version of the inovelli zwave dimmer with scenes and Hubitat with the first red series dimmer and both were implemented natively in a super easy way. I guess I was expecting and hoping for the same with home assistant and white series although I see now that’s not the case. Is it more difficult because of home assistant way of doing things or something to do with the matter spec? Either way, I guess I will get my hands dirty and spend a few hours learning about blueprints and more complicated trigger logic in HA. Thanks all for the help in responding in forums and making things easier.
I can’t speak for Smartthings, but I can say that you were missing out on many of the bells and whistles that Inovelli provides by using the Generic Hubitat driver and not the third-party one provided by Inovelli.
The same applies for the Home Assistant ecosystem. You need to use a HA blueprint to use many of the extras beyond the generic switch/dimmer.
A lot of the current grief with White Series stuff on any ecosystem is that the Matter specifications themselves are still young and under development. Many of the bells and whistles that Inovelli owners enjoy in the Red/Blue series switches like flashing notifications and many customizable parameters either aren’t supported by Matter or require throwing voodoo curses directly at the switches at the API level.
We’ve already seen Matter getting more powerful with the spec v1.4 release, but it will still be year(s) before it catches up with Z-Wave and Zigbee. On the plus side, Home Assistant’s Matter support is pretty quick to add new support as the protocol is expanded and is often the reference platform for vendor/product testing…
I have a tutorial here: Home · jvmahon/HomeAssistant-Tools Wiki · GitHub explaining how button tapping works in Home Assistant. This is meant for those who want to go beyond simply using the existing blueprints to handle button tapping.
As you’ll see form that wiki tutorial, button event handling in Home Assistant is not very intuitive and must be done in a somewhat awkward 2-step mechanism (trigger when ANY event occurs on the button, and in a second step use conditions to detect which event you are interested in). Though the HA interface seems to allow doing both in one step, it won’t work. I understand from Home Assistant that they may eventually re-work the event handling mechanism to be more intuitive.
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This issue of not having custom features is mostly (say, 90%) not a Matter specification issue. Its an issue of vendors not taking full advantage of the capabilities of Matter and going for a bare-bones implementation. Matter provides a flexible mechanism to allow selecting custom features from a list (the mechanism is the Matter “Mode Select” cluster and endpoint). If it can b put into a list (“red, green, blue, yellow”), then Matter provides the mechanism to present it to the end user. This mechanism is the Matter “Mode Select” endpoint and cluster.
The issue is implementation. Mode Select is fully supported in Home Assistant (I wrote some of the original code for that), and is used by Inovelli to expose a number of custom features (if you’re using Home Assistant, look at the configuration options in the “Configuration” section - many are presented using Matter’s Mode Select). Inovelli can, and hopefully will, go further with the use of this feature and I expect to see more use of this in the future.
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Thanks for the write up, it helps a lot