LZW36 - How to disable physical load control?

@EricM_Inovelli

WHAT DO WE WANT? OPTIMIZED SBM!
WHEN DO WE WANT IT? SOON!

2 Likes

Control the bulb, not the switch. That’s really all I’ve got for ya :smiley:

I’m trying to wrap my brain around this concept and stop comparing it to Zooz :slight_smile: .

I’m going with @Bry and @chack suggestions of removing the light switch from Alexa and Google. That is easily done in Hubitat.

I will figure out some good use for the LED later (I like the way you are using it and I may experiment with that).

I feel I’m really close to “perfection” here but I’m starting to believe this is as far as I can go due to platform limitations:

  1. I created a group in Hubitat with all the lights in the room (7 hue devices between iris, strips, bulbs and so on).
  2. I used the Button Controller app in Hubitat to toggle the on/off state of the group when you tap the light switch.

It works beautifully… until it doesn’t:

If she uses the remote control to turn the lights on (she has a hue dimmer on the bedside) it can take up to a minute for Hubitat to update Hue device states (Hubitat pools it at 60 seconds intervals).

This means the lights are on but Hubitat still thinks they are off.
She presses the button when walking out of the room (it only takes a few seconds since it is a small room) and nothing happens.

Why: Hubitat thinks they are off so it it sends an on command which doesn’t do anything because they are already on.

When this happens all you have to do is tap again and it works.
However since there is always a delay between pressing the button and things happening… She left thinking that the lights will turn off eventually.

This is not the end of the world and it has nothing to do with inovelli or Hubitat, it is just how the hue bridge works.

I just thought was worth sharing one of these tricky situations we find ourselves in sometimes.

:joy: :joy: :joy:

image

3 Likes

I assume this Hue dimmer is paired to the Hue bridge? I think you have the ability to instead pair the dimmer to Hubitat. If you do that, I would expect since both the remote and the switch are updating the lights via Hubitat that you wouldn’t have this issue as Hubitat will always have the current device state?

Edit for pairing instructions if you want to try this - Join and Reset Instructions - Hubitat Documentation

Aha! that will definitely do it.
You are correct, when Hubitat is the one triggering the Hue devices it updates their status immediatelly.
I’m thinking that getting the smooth dimmer effect the remote provides when connected direct to Hue may be challenging but I will experiment with it later - I remember seeing something about it at Habitat’s community.

When you get around to taking a look, I came across this app that may be what you’re looking for when I was confirming if they were supported or not -

That button idea is basically what I was thinking! It does get tricky with Hue, since that integration relies on polling, so toggling won’t always work. You can get around that in a few ways that you’ve probably already thought of, but just in case:

  • expose the bulbs to Alexa via Hubitat instead of Hue directly, so voice control still results in instant status updates
  • increase the Hue Bridge polling interval (Hubitat supports up to 10 seconds, but keep in mind this is more taxing for your hub and the Bridge)
  • use a different button device, like a Hue Dimmer or Lutron Aurora directly on Hue — at least for this :slight_smile: (I love my Inovellis!) — or a 2-button or more device on Hubitat so you can assign separate “on” and “off” actions to each (Zooz has a cool new Decora switch-looking remote…that Inovelli originally designed)

On a related note, I don’t want to steer you towards any particular custom apps/drivers, but since you’re using Hue groups: Hubitat doesn’t support the “Start Level Change” and “Stop Level Change” commands on those, which you’d need to make the “dim while holding” thing work. I wrote a custom integration, CoCoHue, that does, in part so I can dim/brighten my Hue lights while holding the paddle and stop on release, just like a “real” smart dimmer with regular bulbs. (And it has more customizable polling intervals.)

2 Likes

Just a thought here… if you don’t want load control, why not just cap off the blue wire coming from the canopy module and hook the lights directly to the black wire? That seems to me like the simplest solution.