Speed of new switches and dimmers?

Yeah, I personally am waiting till it’s configurable. Folks in my house have gotten used to the scene control so even though they don’t like the delay, I can’t take away the scene control now.

Going to throw my hat in the ring here too.

I would much prefer to have the delay settable instead of just on or off and lose scene control (kinda defeats the purpose of paying more for Scene-Enabled “SN” devices).

Is it really that hard to make the 0-255 byte value be a timing value rather than just 0/1 off/on? It could be in 100ms or possibly 10ms increments. For example, values 1,2,3,etc would be 100ms, 200ms, 300ms, etc. Or possibly values 25, 50, 75, etc. would be 250ms, 500ms, 750ms, etc.

700ms just seems way too slow for all or nothing. I think a lot of people can “double-click” a lot faster than that. 500ms is very easy to double-click and 300ms (3 clicks per second) very do-able for most humans. This would allow full scene control to remain while provide a much quicker response to the single-click on / single-click off

@Eric_Inovelli INOVELLI please, Please, PLEASE make this a settable value…even it its as simple as a few fixed values to choose from a list (like 300ms, 500ms, 700ms). Locked-at-700ms or no scene control is not an acceptable solution

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Not an acceptable solution? Dang you guys are hard to please!

Start Rant:

So, the problem here is that we’ve had to outsource our coding to our manufacturer, so it’s not as simple as just updating something quickly, especially when they’re working on multiple projects for us at once. We’re a small team of 7, with @EricM_Inovelli leading the way from a technological side, managing our firmware engineers. In addition, while he may know how to code this himself, our manufacturer has kept the firmware source code to themselves (long story for another day) so we don’t have the ability to just make some quick edits. We have to wait for them to help us, but as noted, we have multiple projects going on at once.

As for this feature (configuring the ms), yes, we recognize that this is something that a few people want and we’ll do our best to do it as we do try our best to incorporate everything.

Speaking of incorporating everything, it’s hard to do so given the space limitations on the Z-Wave 500 Series Chipset. As you may remember, we had to actually add an additional MCU to process the, “basic” commands while the Z-Wave chip processed the more advanced ones (hence Target 0 and Target 1), so it’s also very challenging to add this level of complexity as we run into space issues.

Anyway, sorry for losing my mind, just wanted to give some context as our team has worked incredibly hard on this firmware.

End Rant.

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I appreciate the extra info behind the scenes and realize there is a lot in the coding and micro-code that you don’t have direct control over. I’m not looking for a quick solution, but I do think the current solution is really just a temporary band-aid and the dialog for a long-term solution needs to continue

I’m generally quite tolerant and don’t mind testing and using beta releases. But in this case I feel confident in saying that the given solution, which essentially DISABLES Scene Control and has been indicated as the target for production release, is not acceptable as a long-term solution. Its nice to have a band-aid, but that is not a solution.

Think about it. Why would anyone pay more for a Red Series if they have to cripple the scene control to get less on-delay? I might as well save money and buy the Black Series to get instant on with no scenes, right?

What am I missing here?

I’m just going to go out on a limb, and say we aren’t hard to please. We just found a company equally passionate about home automation willing to listen to what we want from our devices.

What rant? This looks like a company being honest and up front about things! Please keep doing this!

Just remember to include an “if found return” card :wink:

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Technically there are still scenes on the red series with that delay removed, but I get your point. I still find the red series with the limited scenes quite useful when controlling smart bulbs. We are still working on a version with an adjustable ms delay for the people that want to play mortal kombat in turbo mode on their switches though.

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Is Liu Kang’s kicks 200ms or 300ms?

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Nah, I get it – I think I may have had some bad chicken that day or something, I was a bit cranky and took things a little personally… apologies.

As @EricM_Inovelli stated, you still have scenes when you disable the delay (Button 1 - Pushed & Held, Button 7 - Config Button, and Button 8) – in total, I believe you will have 4 scenes at your disposal. In addition, Red Series provides you with Notifications (ie: Garage door is left open, light blinks Red, etc) as well as Energy Monitoring. So, you do have quite a bit of a difference still between Red & Black Series.

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after using the Red series switches for a while now without the latest firmware I find it reasonable for the 700ms delay in place. but I won’t lie and say that it’s not noticeable. Clearly I don’t speak for everyone though.

How about a solution in the middle maybe? i think for the majority of users the delay is only a big issue upon “turning on” a switch and having a delay upon that happening, more so than when we’re turning off a switch. So with that said, would it possible to sacrifice 6 scenes for the sake of the “on” switch with zero delay, and maintain the option of a default 700ms for the “off” while keeping those 6 scenes associated with that part of the paddle, so instead of having essentially 1 scene, you’d at least still have 7 and remove the delay in the process.

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I will say I’ve come a long way since this thread started. I was in the, “it’s not a huge deal” camp, but now that I have the, “instant on”, I do notice it a bit. Still not a huge deal (to me), but I can see why it would bother some people. I think this solution may be reasonable, I’ll pass it onto the engineer. There’s a lot to talk about with this alternate firmware lol!

The clear answer is a parameter that sets the delay. Some people want 0 (off), some want lightning fast (100ms), fast (250ms), default (700ms), etc.

I find that 90% of my switches I have worked to the no delay option with the config button used as a third switch. I’d set them all to 250 or 500ms (or so) depending on some feedback in my home.

I agree totally.

Honestly, 700ms IS SLOW. No, I am not a Mortal Combat player. But I have been working with computer mice for decades and double-click mouse events are in the range of 250-500ms. 700ms is a really slow double click. MOST PEOPLE double-click in less than 500ms and much closer to 250ms. Again, 700ms IS SLOW. Other people have noted this is slow compared to other brand smart switches as well.

A settable delay would be nice. And if that is too hard to implement for whatever reason, just lowering it to something closer to what the rest of the world uses (250-500ms) doesn’t seem like asking too much and very easy to implement :thinking:

Ah, looks like we might be winning @Eric_Inovelli over… Slowly but surely, hehee! Now time to win @EricM_Inovelli over also!

Thanks for coming up with the idea but I don’t think any of us would like that… With your suggestion, only the down paddle (double tap down, triple tap down etc) would have scenes attached. That’d be very confusing and you’d likely find that many people turn a few stuff on with double tap up and turn the same stuff off with double tap down… It’s not really intuitive to turn stuff on with the down toggle.

The solution would really need to be a configurable delay. I feel like the interim solution is already available i.e. use the beta firmware with no delay and very few scenes

If making the delay configurable is too difficult, then hopefully they can settle on a shorter delay for both the tap and the hold (maybe 400ms)

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I’ve read through this entire thread, and am a little worried about ordering Red Dimmers. I am in the process of returning a household’s worth of Jasco/Honeywell dimmer switches because my wife was unsatisfied with the slow ramp up to on when hitting the switch. For some reason they changed the firmware to where you cannot change the ramp speed anymore. They do feature a switch mode that makes the light switch instant (well and truly instant), but you lose the ability to dim at the switch, and any scene change via double or triple click inexplicably ends with a switch on or off, so I can’t even make them into dimmers through automations.

Someone recommended Inovellis to me for the configurability, but it seems according to this thread like the same speed issue may exist in these switches? Some people over on the Home Assistant discord have let me know that these switches support instant on while still allowing dimming by holding the paddles - is that true? Is it “instant” but actually takes 700 ms, or is that when not in instant on mode? I understand (I think) based on this thread that switching a tap to instant on means you lose the ability to multitap the paddle for scene control. But if you do that, does the light come on actually instantly, or with a delay?

Follow-up: if I am in instant on mode and lose scene control at the paddle, is it possible then to use the config button for scene control? That would meet everything I could want from a switch, and would be amazing!

Tl; dr: Do the Red Dimmers meet my specifications:

  1. Truly instant on on single paddle tap
  2. Dimming while holding the paddle
  3. Some kind of scene control?

Thanks so much!

  1. Yes, you can disable the 700ms delay and change the ramp rate and dimming speed to configure them the way you are wanting.
  2. Yes, you still can dim from the paddle with the settings mentioned above.
  3. The configure button still sends a scene in this configuration.
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Absolutely excellent! It seems like a large shipment will be coming my way soon, then. Got my eye on those new scene control/dimmer switch combos too - once those are out I’ll definitely give a couple a whirl. The single scene control with the config button is probably enough, but having a couple dedicated scene switches will probably be easier to use. Thanks for the quick response!

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I’m on the fence of placing a huge whole-house order, and read through this whole thread.

I’m a firm +1 on the adjustable scene-waiting delay camp. You could go ahead and try your double click speed here, but I’m constantly hovering around 300ms, trying to be as natural as possible.

Let’s just say I’m placing the order largely as a vote of confidence based on the communication and transparency shown here!

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We will try our best at the adjustable ms delay. The problem we’re facing is that there’s limited space on the switches and there’s only one firmware engineer at this time and he’s sprawled between multiple new projects.

We are definitely capturing all these suggestions and working towards a solution – amirite @EricM_Inovelli?!

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I’ll just add that I too am on the fence and will not place a large order until the delay issue and the loss of Z-wave dimming when the local load control is disabled.

I suspect that you could give up the firmware space for the local config control easily, I found it frustrating to use and would would rather set my parameters programmatically through my home automation platform. I suspect the local config control, while well intentioned, was catering to a small subset of users.

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