I’ve encountered an interesting inconsistency that made me curious when/where the LZW31 / LZW31-SN dimmers take the minimum and maximum levels into account. Here’s the situation: I have quite a few rooms with CREE LED recessed can retrofit lights. They behave reasonably well with the dimmers, so long as I set the minimum level to be 26% which is still moderately bright; below this the brightness drops off quickly, and is not consistent. I’m currently using SmartThings (v3 hub, new app), and the latest firmware / DTH for the dimmers.
The inconsistency is that when I set the dimmer to a very low level (say 2%) in the app, this appears to be rescaled to the 26%-to-99% range: the lights are moderately bright as I would expect from a “raw” level of 27.5% from a linear rescaling. However, the “default level” parameters don’t seem to do this. If I set a somewhat brighter level, say 8%, in the “Default Z-Wave Level” child device, and then turn the switch on (say from a motion event), the lights barely come on, if at all: this is what I would expect from a “raw” level of 8%… in fact I’m lucky they lit up at all with those LEDs.
I’m wondering if others have seen the same kind of thing. Is this indeed how the rescaling works, and is it how it ought to work? The rescaling of the commands I send from the app seems intuitive enough, but it took me a while to figure out what’s going on with the default levels. I don’t mind doing the math myself, once we know what the formula is, to rescale the values I put into “default level” parameters (either by the parameters page, through the child devices, or through WebCoRE)… but it would be helpful if there were at least a note on the parameters settings page that these values are, unlike setLevel commands, NOT rescaled to the min-max range. Even more helpful, if the device doesn’t rescale the default levels in hardware, would be for the DTH to rescale the values set in the “default level” child devices before writing them to the appropriate parameter.