I’m really interested in this as well. I want to get rid of the fluorescent tube fixtures in my garage and install canless wafers, probably at least 10 or 12. I’ve got Hue bulbs and retrofits in the rest of the house and they’re rock solid, but I don’t need color and the Hue canless wafers are brutally expensive. I’ve already spent a small fortune on this stuff already.
I ditched ST for Hubitat a few years ago. I have two v3 ST hubs but really don’t want to resurrect them just for this purpose. Anyone using these Junos successfully with Hubitat?
Out of curiosity, why not just go with dumb wafers in a CT that works well in that space? Is there a reason you need smart fixtures in a garage? Honest question - not trying to be snarky or anything like that.
Well, I really don’t need smart fixtures or bulbs anywhere. And I certainly don’t need fixtures that can change color in the garage, but I’d like to be able to control them individually and change the color temp.
The garage is fairly large (650 sq ft) and sort of a multi-purpose room. I’d like bright white lighting when I’m using it as a workshop. It’s also sort of a music room. I have a very large pipe organ console that I’m converting to a digital virtual pipe organ. When I’m working on it I’d also like bright white light in that area, but when I’m practicing, I’d like a softer warm white in that area (the console has its own lighting) and probably dim or no lights where the workbench and tool cabinets are.
Do I need any of this? Not really, but I didn’t need the expensive cabinets and workspace either, but I finally have my dream garage and my wife never says no so I have to police myself when it comes to buying things. A dozen or more Hue wafers is hard on the wallet, and like I said, I don’t really need color. The Junos would be fine if I could trust they’d be reliable. But I suppose that’s part of what you pay for when you buy into the Hue ecosystem. At this stage in my life, the last thing I want to be spending time on is fiddling around with Zigbee issues.
Hey group,
Has anyone successfully been able to use a Smartthings hub and group or group and bind with these wafers? If so could you share your process? I know how to download drivers on the web/api and change drivers in the smartthings app, but these wafers don’t seem to work like other zigbee bulbs.
I was able to do it in Home Assistant so I know the wafers are capable, but ran into the unstable mesh and ~15 device limit.
Now I’ve got them on a Smartthings hub, with difficulty pairing, but have ~45 of them paired and working pretty reliably, but really want to group and bind.
I, too, have made the mistake of purchasing these wafers. I needed something low profile for a remodel where a housing wouldn’t fit.
I’m using HA and ZHA with the Nortek HUZUSB-1 with EZSP 6.7.8.
ZHA successfully adds the devices as “Samsung Electronics ABL-LIGHT-Z-001” but only the on/off control functions.
What I’ve seen in the logs is that the Juno lights will function with Zigbee cluster commands for on/off, brightness, color temperature, and group joining BUT the lights do not send back any information to ZHA. As such, the status of the lights never updates in ZHA/HA. I also am unable to poll the lights for any information using cluster commands; in the logs zigpy says the request times out. From what I can parse it looks like bellows never receives any data from the light either.
Right now I’m only able to get them to work as part of a light group with other lights and I don’t need to do anything with the light individually.
What I’d like to know is why doesn’t the light respond back to the coordinator? Is it an issue with the coordinator or the light firmware? I’m thinking it’s the light because all of my other devices don’t have this issue. I don’t know how to troubleshoot the lack of response from the light back to bellows and ZHA. Maybe the lack of response is causing them to get kicked off the network?
Anyway, they’ve only been installed for a few hours so I’ll see if they stay connected. Just adding my experience here because this is the only place I found on the internet with this much information on the Juno lights.
Sorry to hear you’re in this predicament. Something seems off in your setup vs. mine.
I had decent success with ZHA and these wafers in small quantities. I had my kitchen paired with 11 wafers for a few months.
Each was individually addressable for on/off, dim level, CCT color temperature.
I was able to group the wafers into a zigbee group.
I was able to bind the group to an inovelli blue switch in smart bulb mode, and dimming/on/off all worked.
But I did have one or two drop off the mesh over 2-3 months. Then it was a PITA to get that one back on and rebuild the group and binding setups where they’re all on the same circuit.
I hope that helps. In small quantities (<10 units) these did seem to work pretty well.
Sonoff USB Zigbee “P” Version on Home Assistant ZHA,
46 2-1 Switches -Firmware 2.08, but hit that limit that when I added >10 to 15 Juno Cans, the network came to a crawl, was unstable and had trouble adding additional Juno cans.
Sorry if this is a bit off topic for this thread. Adding here because I think it will be of interest to people like me who have had issues with the Juno Connect wafers.
I’m looking to add some more lights, and I’ve had the same connection issues with my Juno lights as multiple people described on this thread. What do I really want? I want smart wafer lights that support multiple platforms and can work without needing to go out to the cloud (i.e. pretty much Matter support).
Does this exist? Well, I just found these that look pretty close:
They are available at Home Depot and Amazon for about $40 a piece at the moment. It’s not clear if they have a Matter-enabled firmware update, but Wiz is definitely getting there.
Yes, they are WiFi, not ZigBee. I’d rather them be ZigBee. But, does it really matter (no pun intended)? The biggest thing I see that I’d be giving up is the possibility of binding the Inovelli switch directly to the lights. Anything else?
So the obvious answer to the question of zigbee wafers is Hue. The main issue is that they are $70 a piece. But I got a sample, and the color really is better than most of the competitors, and dimmability is better, etc. For my new house, given the Juno issues, we’ve decided to go with Hue almost everywhere for compatibility reasons. However, Hue does not make a gimbal/pointable light, like Juno does. So instead, we are going with a Wiz Pro product as well, Liteline - Product Details - LUNA 4" ONCLOUD - RGBTW. I have a test sample arriving soon. I’ve asked around, and Wiz seems to be one of the better options for Wi-Fi lights around. Amusingly, Wiz is also owned by Philips (owner of Hue).
Thanks for your thoughts @simnick. I just might need to order one Hue and one of the Halo Wiz wafers to evaluate and see if I can justify the extra $30 per fixture. Good luck with testing the Wiz Pro you have arriving soon, I’d be curious to hear what you think of it.
Value is subjective of course, and the price of Hue products is definitely a bit hard to swallow. In my opinion though, lighting is one of those things that should “just work” and Philips has earned their reputation (and therefore premium price) when it comes to Hue devices.
We recently bought a new house and I decided to start over with our home automation. I tested the waters with a few Hue bulbs and can retrofits and they met the “just work” criteria every time, and as simnick pointed out, brightness, dimmability, color, etc. is very good.
Much as it hurts the wallet, I’ve retrofitted every can in our house and replaced most bulbs with Hue, and I’m going to install about 12 of the canless wafers in my garage to replace the ugly fluorescents currently out there. I try not to think how much they cost, but I’m fairly confident that they will continue to work without any issues. My wife is exceptionally tolerant of my home automation projects, but WAF is still important to me and Hue meets that criteria as well.
Apologize for the late feedback, but all works flawlessly now based on your input; I swapped out the aux and am now using two smart switches. Is there any way to synch the leds for dimming? Thanks for the assist and absolutely love these switches.
Now all I need now is a combo blue series light/fan switch
I tried pairing 12 Juno RetroBasics Zigbee lights with Hubitat and it worked for a day before some lights dropped off. Tried with Smartthings but I am trying to figure out how use Zigbee group messaging with them (as a virtual group of 12 was unreliable and popcorny). I used the zigbee-light-multifunction-v6 edge driver that allows configuring a group but I have not figured out how to create a virtual device that can issue commands to the Zigbee group. Has anyone figured out how to do this?
I recently purchased 4 of these recessed wafers (4" model) for my bedroom at home. I’ve been trying to get them to work with home-assistant. The PC running HA is on a different floor, so I’ve been trying to get it to work with repeaters (Sengled E1C-NB7 plugs, Sylvania plug, tradfri plug). I’ve tried both ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT without much success and I’ve tried channels 11, 24, and 25. Oddly enough, when I pair the sengled plugs then the Juno wafers, the plugs will start to randomly trigger on and off.
I’m not sure if other people have had success yet with these lights, but this is seemingly the most thorough discussion I’ve found on the matter
Wanted to give an update regarding my experience with these Juno slim recessed lights. When I purchased these lights, they were essentially the only reasonably available smart slim recessed lighting with color temperature on Zigbee, which was a requirement for me in the room since I intended to use Zigbee binding directly to an Inovelli Blue switch in addition to control via Home Assistant. While initial installation and connection with my Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 dongle using zigbee2mqtt was fairly smooth and I was able to bind them to the switch as expected, despite around a year of periodic troubleshooting (including creating my own converters, using the ones included in zigbee2mqtt updates, moving my Z2M coordinator, etc), I have been unable to permanently resolve my issue where one (or more) of the lights would stop responding every 1-4 weeks, which required a full factory reset and reconnect of all the Juno lights on the switch (since you need to quickly toggle on/off power 5 times to reset). That itself was a very frustrating experience since it often required multiple factory reset and re-pair attempts until I got lucky and all 4 lights reconnected at the same time (sometimes upwards of an hour of attempting to fix it), which felt a bit like playing smart-home wack-a-mole. I cannot imagine how much more frustrating it would be if I was trying to reset and reconnect an even greater number of lights.
Recently, I broke down and replaced the Juno lights with the Philips Hue slim downlights that have become available since my initial purchase. I don’t always feel paying the premium price for Hue is worthwhile (especially for more common bulb types), but given the few competitors for this specific type of light, I just wanted something that I was confident would work and I’ve had a good experience with all my other Hue bulbs. Frankly, I would have preferred cheaper Hue bulbs with only color temperature and not full color, but those to my knowledge are not available in this form factor. In any case, as expected, I have had none of the issues I was previously having despite changing nothing else in my setup.
There may have been other contributing factors. I have a pretty big Z2M network, but none of my other devices have connection issues. I run an HA add-on called Adaptive Lighting which gradually transitions the brightness and color of lights throughout the day by triggering transitions roughly every 1-2 minutes, so there’s a fairly high volume of commands being sent to my lights. However, only these Juno lights had issues, and that add-on is part of the reason I wanted smart lights with color temperature in the first place, so I have no desire to give it up even if it was a contributing factor.
If I had to guess, there are probably underlying issues with the Juno lights that would require a firmware update to address, but I’d be very surprised if I was able to do OTM updates on my existing lights. I no longer have them installed to check, but I believe I was on firmware version 1.0, if anyone is curious. Perhaps newer Juno lights will eventually fix this issue, but until then and it’s confirmed they are fixed, I’d recommend people stay clear of these if you are using a similar setup to mine.