I think this is actually the intended effect if I am understanding correctly. In Z-wave, remote control refers to all commands. This includes configuration commands that would adjust the LED color or intensity.
Hmm, I think you are understanding correctly. In previous versions of firmware/driver I was able to change the LED brightness using the child device even when āDisable Remote Controlā was set to āYesā. Thatās no longer the case now, but I can see how that can be the intent.
I think I will try to re-enable Remote Control for the affected devices but try to keep unintended requests from hitting them.
Iām in the same boat as apwelsh . My Red Series Dimmer was still at 1.35, I believe, from when I bought it. With my wife finally sick of the quirks of shutting off on her randomly, I decided to bite the bullet and buy a Z-Waveme stick. I too did the update to 1.48 otz and the 1.47 bin. It wouldnāt take, so I tried 1.47 for both. Still nothing. It was at this time the switch stopped responding. No LED. No on/off. Tried the air gap, holding button for 20sec, and still nothing. It pairs with Smartthings when I press the config button three times, but there is nothing there physically. The z stick I think can see it. When I request node info the firmware line is blank, so I canāt imagine that is a good thing. Iām a former electricianās apprentice, so Iām good with 120v power. Any ideas? If not, I guess Iām out a dimmer. I think I bought this in May or June. Is there anyway I can get it fixed or exchanged? I really want to love these switches, but I can only take so much from my wife, and now this. Thank you in advance for any help.
Factory reset is 30 seconds not 20- hold the button until the LED bar goes red.
I assume you are using the Silicon Labs Z-Wave tool, right? Try this.
First unpair the Z-Wave tool from your hub if you did that already.
Then factory reset the dimmer with 30 second config press. Once factory reset is done, airgap the dimmer to kill it.
Now take your laptop and z-wave stick RIGHT NEXT TO the dimmer. Push airgap back in.
Then in Z-Wave tool, unpair the dimmer- on the pairing page increment the counter on the unpair button to one, then press unpair, tap config button on dimmer 3x. Zwave tool should accept that.
Now pair the dimmer to the zwave tool and update the firmware as per the update instructions.
Does that work?
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I saw the ādisable remoteā and ādisable localā access options.
However, Iām trying to figure out the use cases for those. I suppose that you might disable the wall switch to keep the neighborās bratty kid from screwing with all the lights. But, not sure why youād disable access from the hub???
And, if you disable control from the hubācan the hub re-enable the ability to control the device or does that take some magic with the physical switch? It would be a fun time to disable physical and remote control and brick the thing. 
(I assume a hard reset would resolve that).
Luckily you can enable access for local control by pressing config button 8 times. Also, you enable remote control through a hub.
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Use with smart bulbs is probably then most common reason: you donāt want to āhardā dim a smart bulb, and youād generally also want to avoid switching power to them on and off. Enabling local protection takes care of that and allows you to set up automations that just respond to scene events (taps, holds, and releases) from the switch to manipulate your bulbs as desired. The Red Series would obviously work best here, especially if your smart bulbs are not also Z-Wave.
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Thank you for the quick reply, Chris. I should have mentioned that I saw some people say 20 and some people say 30 seconds. Before I posted I tried 20, 30, 40sec and a minute, but the led bar will not light red or any other color. I just tried it again as well, and nothing. No clicking noises, no led bar lit. If the reset doesnāt even work, am I to try the rest of your steps? Iām willing to, but I will have to load the controller on to my laptop as itās on my PC at the moment. The PC is about 20ft(10ft up and 10ft over) though a floor from the dimmer. House is ten years old if that helps.
I should also note that I had this dimmer installed for a few months working āfineā, other than a lot of random ghost shut offs and the led bar notifications disappearing after an on/off was pressed. My wife hated the shut offs and I was annoyed with the notifications disappearing and finally decided to update.
I believe the problem that @apwelsh was having was related to the version of PC Controller he was using. It is mentioned in another thread, but PC Controller 5.39+ is required to properly flash the bin file.
If the device can still do inclusion / exclusion I would say it has a good chance of being recovered. Doing as @Chris mentioned is the best bet for success.
If you disable control from the hub, you can still re-enable it from the hub (in fact, that is the only thing you can do from the hub). The local vs RF control is actually defined in the zwave standard (see here if you want to get technical warning: this is a link to a pdf)
Local Control
| Value | Description | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Unprotected | The device is not protected, and may be operated normally via the user interface. |
| 1 | Protection by sequence | The device is protected by altering the way the device normally is operated into a more complicated sequence of actions, e.g. if a device normally is controlled by a single press of a button on the device it might be changed to require 3 rapid presses on a button to control it. For the LZW31-SN, this means the physical buttons will no longer control the output load, but it will still send commands to associated devices and still report scenes. This is the value that is used when you press the config button 8x to ādisable the local relayā |
| 2 | No operation possible | It is not possible at all to control a device directly via the user interface. Pressing the config button 8x does nothing, and button presses do not control associated devices or report scenes. I think you can still factory reset by holding down the config button for 30 seconds, but I have not tested this. |
RF Protection:
| Value | Description | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Unprotected | The device MUST accept and respond to all RF Commands |
| 1 | Protection by sequence | All runtime Commands are ignored by the device. The device MUST still respond with status on requests. For the LZW31-SN, the device will ignore commands such as on/off/dim, but will still respond to status updates. |
| 2 | No operation possible | No RF response at all. The device will not even reply to status requests. It is only possible to un-protect the device with the Protection Set Command. It is not allowed ignore Protection Commands. If a device is excluded from the network, the protection states will be reset. |
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Thank you, Eric.
Chris, Iām not sure if a true factory reset ever happened with no red led sidebar light, or any light color for that matter. I continued on anyways with your instructions. It seemed to delete the device just fine from the PC Controller, but when I went to add it, it just seems to search forever. Finally I just hit abort, and to my surprise the dimmer showed up as an S2 device. I followed the update instructions by using 1.47 of otz(target 0)and bin(target 1). The dimmer added back into smartthings, but it is again unresponsive to pressing up/down or pressing the config button. No led lit either. I performed your steps again completely a second time with the same exact result of not being able to add the dimmer back in without hitting the abort button, but once again it still added the device, so I kept on to the update. Still the same result.
The two things that Iād really like to know is, what does it mean when the led light bar is not lighting under any circumstance. And also why does the firmware version keep coming up blank; both on the PC controller(get) and on smartthings IDE?
Should I be removing the device handler before I do your steps? Because it has been installed both times that Iāve performed your steps.
Now that 1.48 is flashed, try pulling the air gap switch for 30 seconds. See if you get any LED activity- when you push airgap back in you should get a blink or two at least.
My thinking on the whole thing- you said a previous update failed. So I assumed that the chip got partially flashed or the chip software was otherwise corrupted in such a way that factory reset didnāt work but inclusion did.
I donāt know SmartThings, but I know the LED should work no matter what driver or device handler your hub does or does not have. The exception would be if config parameters have disabled it, or if thereās still firmware corruption on either the main chip or the Holtek MCU.
Question- when you did the update, did you see it transfer a few thousand blocks on Target 0 and a few hundred blocks on Target 1? Or did it finish quickly?
Iād suggest as the next step do the air gap 30 seconds reboot and try the factory reset again. See if you get any LED activity.
The other thing that comes to mind is encryption. You should try to add the dimmer to the Silicon Labs software without encryption. That may help things.
Try the air gap and factory reset again, try adding it to the z-wave tool with no encryption. Let me know what happens.
Target 0 was about 3600 and target 1 was so fast I couldnāt see, but they both said successful. I should note that I used 1.47 for both.
I tried the reset and airgap again with no luck. Iāll try your no encryption suggestion tonight after work or in the morning. I see a busy work day in my future. . .
Thank you Chris and for your help so far! This is really appreciated.
It shouldāve been about 350-ish packets or soā¦so if it was started and immediately went away, it did NOT flash target 1. Now if you say you started it and walked away to grab a beverage, I would agree it may have looked fast. However, it does still take some time to flash.
Glad to be of service.
Sounds like you have a successful flash of the main chip, but a bad flash of the Holtek. As @harjms said the Holtek is about 350 blocks, itās not āget up and grab a beerā level but itās long enough that you will see it transfer. Thatās probably why your LEDs arenāt working.
Try the Holtek again, do a few tries and try to get the full 350ish block transfer. After that flashes and comes back successful, airgap reboot the switch. Ideally you will see a color flash as it boots back up and then you are back in business
Yeah, for sure watch the bin to see if it does make it through all packets. Also, make sure you have PC Controller 5.39. Have the Z-stick as its own network if you havenāt already done so. You can click the āResetā button in the network management of PC controller to do this. Sometimes I have to close PC Controller and re-open it to get the PC Controller to show the reset. It should be the only node in your network.
When including the dimmer just click ācancelā on the security options screen (S0 / S2 options). This will do the inclusion without security.
So, for Hubitat thereās less reason that in SmartThings. For Hubitat the only reason that occurs to me would be if you wanted in essence a read-only switch. Meaning, if you want to be able to detect its state but not modify it. This is useful if you share the device with an external system (EG. IFTTT) that you are afraid might try to change the state.
And that is a particular problem in SmartThings, where the current status of the Google and Amazon assistant integrations are charitably described as ānot goodā. The basic problem is that there is no way to keep SmartThings from sharing all its devices with Google - you donāt get to pick. (In Hubitatās community integration, you do). So if you want to put your switch in the right house and room in Google Home, but you donāt want the assistant killing power to your smart bulbs, you gotta turn off remote commands.
Also, consider the situation where you have a nighttime mode and donāt want your kids messing with a switch or something. And then the kids discover they can just yell at Google to turn on the lights instead.
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I have two switches that I canāt flash. Using the PC controller version 5.39.
When I get the Get button the log shows āSending OTA Firmware Update Get Commandā, then nothing else.
All the other switches successfully get the device info and let me select the files to flash.
These two wonāt get that far. No error messages or anything. I tried pulling the air gap on both with no luck.
Any ideas?
Try unpairing them, then pair to the PC controller with no security- when you triple tap the config button on the switch, a thing pops up on the PC asking what security to use. Hit cancel. It should pair just fine, only with no crypto. See if that helps you do the update.
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That was it my friend. I did the removal and adding from within Home Assistant. Same end game.
I guess I must have added those two securely before. That also explains the other odd behaviour I was having with those lights.
Thanks!
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