mmWave Switches - TOTALLY WORTH THE WAIT!

Digital Lounge General Discussion
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I’ve had my mmWave switches installed for about a week now. I’ve got the physical tap buttons controlling the load and the occupancy controlled through HA via z2m, with an automation that turns on the LED bar to white at 100% an night (nightlight) and turns the load on during the day. Couldn’t be happier and the wife loves it! These switches are rock solid at presence detection.

The only odd thing I noticed was the internal temperature runs hot (100F). Is that normal? It’s happening on all three of my presence switches. I’ve got 30 other inovelli blue dimmers and they all run mid 80’s.

Great work Team Inovelli!

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Yep. The mmwave hardware runs hot. This is well within normal operating for these switches though.

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I like the nightlight configuration, I turn on dim white on a central switch when the house goes into “Sleep” mode.. I have installed 5 mmWave Blue’s that were from the kickstarter. All working great after tuning. I even used the LED bar to help with tuning by turning one of the LED’s green while room was showing occupied. This made it easy to observe when the sensor showed occupied to tune the perimeter, seating area and deal with blinds that move when the HVAC is running.

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I have to agree! There are things I wish were different about these switches, (FoV, max mmWave Distance), but if I had a time machine I would tell myself to get more…many, many more!

TIP: A laser measuring tape that can do centimeters makes configuring these things much easier!

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Loving this switch! I have it wired up in a bathroom and as soon as you walk it it turns on the lights instantly (dim at night, full brightness at daytime). Very cool effect.

@rohan I’m noticing that the operating temp of mine is 126°F (switch is off). While ‘Over Heat’ shows as False, both the website and indegogo pages state that the operating temp is 32-95° F (0-35° C). Out of an abundance of caution I’m going to pull the switch for now.

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The 32-95 F spec refers to the range of the temperature of the room, not the internal temperature of the switch.

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How much extra power does the sensor draw? I assume it’s minimal, but curious given the comments about temperature.

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Ah - that makes a whole lot of sense! Thank you.

For anyone else who might find this in search, I discovered this detail in the parameters docs:

Overheat Protection shuts off your switch once the threshold of 90°C (194°F) is met and will return to normal once the switch reaches 70°C (158°F).

Blue Series mmWave Presence Dimmer Switch • Parameters | Inovelli Help Center

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Have you automated this through HA? If so, would you share your YAML? I really like this idea.

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I am using Hubitat.

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There’s a project that was mentioned here called Lampie that lets you define visual notifications and then assign switches to them. The integration exposes a “notification” switch that you can turn on and off to have the LED strip do the thing you defined using an automation. I’m using Lampie to define a night light and then have an automation that turns the night lights on when certain conditions are met. I also have it do a more complex countdown when you close one of the exterior doors that gives you some visual indication of how long until the door locks (and what the state of the door lock is).

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Thanks for the suggestion. From the readme: “Currently this is limited to Blue switches using ZHA, but ideally Z2M and other Inovelli switches will be added in the future.”

So I’ll keep this bookmarked until its available for Z2M.

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There’s a branch that is in Alpha with Z2M support.

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Thanks for pointing that out. I would never have known. I manually downloaded the zip and got the integration working. It DOES recognize the blue series switches but only the 2 in 1, not the mmWave versions. And it doesn’t control the notification on the 2 in 1 switches. But its a start. I’ll keep monitoring the project.

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I used this script from zanix: GitHub - zanix/home-assistant-blueprints: My Blueprints for Home Assistant. https://home-assistant.io

It only support blue switches, but does support the mmWave switches.

Here is my automation yaml. I have one for Occupied state and another for Unoccupied state. This can be combined, but I haven’t got around to it:

alias: Main Bath - Occupied (Night LEDs / Day Light)
description: “”
triggers:

  • entity_id:
    • binary_sensor.main_bathroom_light_occupancy
      to:
    • “on”
      trigger: state
      conditions:
      actions:
  • choose:
    • conditions:
      • condition: time
        after: “23:00:00”
        before: “06:00:00”
        sequence:
      • target: {}
        data:
        target:
        entity_id:
        - light.main_bathroom_light
        - light.main_bathroom_bath_light
        - fan.main_bathroom_fan
        led: -1
        color: 255
        level: 100
        effect: solid
        duration: 255
        action: script.inovelli_led_control
      • target:
        entity_id:
        - light.main_bathroom_light
        action: light.turn_off
    • conditions:
      • condition: time
        after: “06:00:00”
        before: “23:00:00”
        sequence:
      • target:
        entity_id: light.main_bathroom_light
        action: light.turn_on
        mode: restart

Unoccupied:

alias: Main Bath - Unoccupied
description: “”
triggers:

  • entity_id: binary_sensor.main_bathroom_light_occupancy
    to: “off”
    trigger: state
    conditions:
    actions:
  • condition: state
    entity_id: binary_sensor.main_bathroom_light_occupancy
    state: “off”
  • target:
    entity_id:
    - light.main_bathroom_light
    - light.main_bathroom_bath_light
    action: light.turn_off
  • target: {}
    data:
    target:
    entity_id:
    - light.main_bathroom_light
    - light.main_bathroom_bath_light
    - fan.main_bathroom_fan
    led: -1
    effect: clear
    duration: 255
    action: script.inovelli_led_control
    mode: restart
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There is a one line update needed to have Lampie recognize the new switches. Hopefully there will be an update for that at some point, but in the meantime, here’s what I did to add the mmWave switches:

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Thanks! I added that line to the const.py file and was able to see the mmWave switches in the list. I still can’t get the notifications to broadcast using the integration. Not sure what I’m doing wrong but I setup a test notification and when I click the “Notifcation” control is turns back off immediately and the LED bar is not affected.

    "VZM32-SN",  # presence switch/dimmer
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I’d check the logs and maybe restart HA and see what happens. I’ve never had any problems with the notification switch doing what it’s supposed to do.

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The logs are a little cryptic to me. Does this mean anything to you?

This error originated from a custom integration.

Logger: custom_components.lampie.orchestrator
Source: custom_components/lampie/orchestrator.py:1175
integration: Lampie (documentation, issues)
First occurred: 4:29:19 PM (178 occurrences)
Last logged: 4:32:10 PM

missing LED config and/or source for dismissal on switch light.office_downlight_switch; skipping processing Z2M event led_effect_complete_ALL_LEDS
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I’d try deleting the Lampie entry for that notification and recreate it. It’s almost like there’s a partial config there (which shouldn’t be possible) that Lampie can’t process.