My setup is non z-wave smart recessed lights controlled mainly by alexa + inovelly red switch in “smart bulb mode”.
When ISP has problems (quite often) or just smarthings hub (way more often) and there is no internet, the switch is basically useless. I can’t turn on/off lights at all.
actually cut power to the smart bulbs?
Yes.
I’d like to return to basic button 1 behavior → turn on & off electricity.
Without “smart bulb mode” I used option to press config button 8 times and switch was changing modes between “disable relay on/off”.
With smart bulb mode on it doesn’t work, it seems that switch completely ignores setting of “disable local control”
What hub? You may be able to setup a scene (say 6 down taps) to disable disable smart bulb mode. That way you can disable and then turn off your non z wave bulbs.
Your scenes won’t work locally offline since they’d have to go through the hub. Best bet in that case would be either going with zwave bulbs and looking into associating the bulbs with the switch, which would remove the dependency on the hub as they’d be communicating directly, or swapping to a local hub like Home Assistant or Hubitat if those are options? That removes the internet dependency and as long as you have power to the hub then all of your scenes would still work (just a matter of making sure your devices are supported on that platform).
I assume the bulbs automatically come on when power is restored, so by re-enabling local control (config button 8x) it’ll cut power/restore power causing the bulbs to turn back on?
I could be WAY off on all of this since it’s been a minute since I’ve gone through it… But I believe when SBM is enabled, the local protection state is always on no matter what. Disabling SBM should allow you to change local protection from the switch. So what you’d want to do is disable SBM, turn the load on at the switch, and then enable local protection so pressing the switch won’t turn the load off. Then when you have a hub outage, you should be able to disable local protection and cut the load to the bulbs.
Now my personal opinion… instead of trying to make your switches work for WHEN your hub has an outage, work at moving to local control. I believe smartthings has local control for lighting available, but other hubs like Hubitat and Home Assistant definitely do. You can also use zwave bulbs and setup association so it bypasses the hub completely. All of these are better options long-term.
For local control in SmartThings, so would need to be using an Edge driver. As of last report, Inovelli released an Edge driver for the switch. I believe an Edge driver for the dimmer is coming soon.
Yes, I went with this direction.
I personally think when SBM mode is enabled, then “config button 8x” action should turn on/off SBM mode together with local relay.
I originally started with the simplest possible path - smarthings, but apparently it is not enough. Considering going into local hub direction, as with ~1 year with smart home, I see significant issues with basic functions (not only inovelli & smarthings) with internet outage.
The development of Matter standards are keeping me cautios for now, as I don’t want to do change full house to new smart standards in a year or two again.
I was not able to find any z-wave recessed bulbs that provide same functions as others, like dimming & different colors.
Using lumary recessed lights now, but would switch to z-waves right away if there would be any good lights on the market
If you have an old pc, old laptop, or any sort of hardware kicking around you can setup home assistant quite easily. There is a smartthings integration that will connect to your smartthings hub and expose all the devices to home assistant. This would give you the opportunity to play around with it, get comfortable with how automations work etc without really having to mess with anything in your smarthome. When you do get comfortable, then all you need to do is pick up a zwave/zigbee stick, pair your devices and away you go with full local control.
The upside of Home Assistant is that you’ll be able to continue doing Zwave/Zigbee/whatever else you have and then also run Matter from the same hub. Either from a new stick to plug in, or at least with some Zigbee sticks they’ll be able to run Matter side by side on the same stick. Even if Matter takes off, I don’t see that deprecating current devices regardless though?
You Home Assistant fanboys crack me up
Multiprotocol support is not something special or unique about Home Assistant. That is the upside of most smart hubs out there.
You’re right, but none of them do it as good as Home Assistant
If compatibility is the goal, no hub even comes close to Home Assistant.
I’d even argue that ease-of-use for basic stuff is almost on par as Smartthings or Hubitat now as well. Maybe even easier since if you want to add custom drivers to either you’re messing with driver code in the IDE/Device Manager, where a lot of the HA integrations are now fully configured through the GUI.
I absolutely agree and am sure we’ll see most if not all the main hubs support it. It’s just tbd on other hubs supporting it out the gate or with the same hardware while HA already has the basic integration built and did a example to follow along with for anyone interested in matter so there’s no speculating since it’s already done.
And between Hubitat and HA in my personal experience I had more luck with integrations and appreciated the UI and control I got from HA. I think Hubitat was easier to approach when I started, but HA has made some huge strides In making it a lot more accessible since then and I think that’s awesome too. Ultimately the more the merrier
Haha. Now you’re pushing it I don’t deny HA is very powerfull with more integrations than any other platform. But “ease-of-use” is not one of its hallmarks. Its notorious for having a very steep learning curve and not well accepted by non-techy people. Quirks, Json,YAML, HACS, ZHA, MQTT Geeks love it… but Its gibberishish to the average joe homeowner.
One year ago I’d agree I was pushing it, probably so much I wouldn’t even dare to say what I said LOL
I’ve always done what’s known as a “split setup”. So instead of putting everything in one huge yaml file, I organized it into folders and individual files for each integration. So I’d have like thermostats.yaml, sonarr.yaml, google_nest.yaml, etc… etc… Everything got it’s own folder so it was easy to find to adjust if needed.
Overall I had like 70-80 individual yaml files. As of this month, that’s now down to less than 10. And those are more niche items. Everything else is all done in the GUI now. The push to make it a more user-friendly platform has been huge and they really are starting to get to the point where the more entry-level user can get fairly comfortable with it quite quickly.
I just installed my first Inovelli switch (replacing a GE enbrighten switch), and I have two problems:
the scene control is backwards from every other switch I have in my system (Aeotec, Zooz, Enbrighten), Scene002 is tap up, and Scene001 is tap down. I initially tried inverting the switch, but the local control is reversed in the process - I had to change my scene controls. I think this is a Z-Wave standard, correct me if I’m wrong, please.
I tried smart bulb mode so the switch would only send remote scene controls, but the internal relay no longer responds to any on/off commands. How do I configure the switch so the paddle sends remote scene events, but the internal relay is not controlled by the paddle?
The scenario is the switch controls an overhead light I only want to come on when I double tap, and I want single taps to turn on a scene for the rest of the room (controlled from home assistant).
That’s what it’s supposed to do. If you are powering smart bulbs via a wired connection, then you do not want the paddle presses to cut the power to the bulbs.
Exactly how you have it by turning on Smart Bulb Mode. This ensures the switch constantly puts out 100% and paddle presses have no effect on the wired load.
Presuming the overhead light is not a smart bulb? If so, put the switch in the smart bulb mode. Code an automation to turn the SWITCH on with a double-tap up (and probably off with a double-tap down. Code an automation to run your scene with a single-tap up.
If you want dimming, instead of using the Smart Bulb Mode, just Disable Local Control. That way paddle presses will have no effect, but you can still set a dim level with your automations.
Its notorious for having a very steep learning curve and not well accepted by non-techy people. Quirks, Json,YAML, HACS, ZHA, MQTT Geeks love it… but Its gibberishish to the average joe homeowner.