It’s my understanding that the Dimmer is the only one that can make smart bulbs dim in real time (however, I’m intrigued by this post: Let's see how far we can push the red series...shall we? - #8 by jtronicus – the hold/release was not supposed to be in the firmware haha. It’s nice that it is, but we never asked for it) – I’ll clarify with @MxMLssR in a second bc we may be talking about two different things.
When we’re talking about dimming capability, we’re talking about dimming the smart bulb in real time (well, as close as you can get w/out a wired connection).
Here’s the main distinction between the On/Off’s and Dimmers (both Red Series):
On/Off’s
- You can control a smart bulb with an On/Off switch, but it will simply be On/Off (no dim)
- You can, however, use scenes to change the dim level (but this is more static vs dynamic/real-time dimming).
- What I mean here is that you can multi-tap your switch to setup different scenes to control your bulbs (ie: Double-tap = 25%, Triple-tap = 50%, 4x tap = 75%, etc)
- But you cannot hold the button down to tell the bulb to dim up and down in real time (again, there was some bonus scenes in our firmware, so who knows per the URL above)
Dimmers
- Dimmers can do the same thing as On/Off’s in regards to scenes, but they can also send a dim command to the HUB (or another Z-Wave bulb) to dim up/down
- This is what was shown in the video above, which I’ll explain below.
Setup
We used the following for this setup:
- Inovelli Dimmer (Red Series)
- Ilumin RGBW Smart Bulb
- Samsung SmartThings v3 HUB (it will work with V2 as well)
- Dimmer & Bulb Device Handlers
- Z-Wave Association Tools
NOTE: I’ll provide links once these are up and in stock and we’ve published the handlers/drivers. If someone runs across this and the links are still not up, tag me and I’ll add them.
Notes
- The setup was a 4-Way non-neutral setting, but it will work in any setting as the wiring is not the important part here.
- First, you pair the products to ST, then you use a SmartApp Eric M created to associate the dimmer and bulb together (use Group 2 & Group 4).
- Now that they’re associated, they bypass the Hub and talk to one another directly
I’ll definitely provide better notes once everything is released and likely post it in the Tips & Tricks section.
Your guess is correct – it does work with either On/Off and Dimmers and I believe you’re also correct in that it replicates a push or a hold for On/Off or Dimming.
Yeah, honestly, we didn’t even know the aux switch would work with the dimmer switch to change the bulb dimness. That was an added bonus as well!
Here’s me losing my mind actually: