I’ve installed a white switch and with the 1.0.5 firmware I LOVE it. I’ve been using the LED bar to remind everyone when our awning is out by turning the bar red. I’d like to be able to turn the bar another color if the garage door is open or the alarm is armed. But I need to be able to deal with showing more than one color if more than one of those things is going on at a given time. Is there any easy way in HomeKit to tell the LED bar (or I guess any colored light for that matter) to alternate every few seconds between 2 or 3 different colors indefinitely until commanded otherwise? I think trying to convey more than 2 or 3 pieces of information this way becomes too confusing for home occupants. But giving meaning to 2 or 3 different colors on a switch could be very useful.
No. HomeKit cannot run any automation indefinitely.
You… may… be able to write a lot of automations which may get confusing and it will take some brain storing to figure out a sequence of how the events should fire but you could do something alone the lines of
If awning is out, turn lights red.
If laundry is done, turn lights blue.
If security devices are open/unlocked, turn lights orange.
Etc etc
Then additional automations that would have to check for colors and conditions
When light is on red, (start order of operations here and keep moving the colors up 1 per automation) if laundry is done, turn light blue.(add stop shortcut if true); if security devices open turn light orange (end shortcut if true)
When light turns on blue, if security devices are open/unlocked, turn light orange, end shortcut; if awning is open, turn light red, end shortcut
So on and so forth. It’s a very cumbersome process. You want to cycle thru checking each one and turning the light to the next color if true, or skip to the next one
Then in the end you’ll need to write automations to turn the last light off, that’s remaining.
If awning is closed, check state of all other devices, if no other device is triggering their light color, turn off notification bar.
Shortcuts already kind of sucks to work with because it’s so limited. I haven’t even attempted this yet and I use the color indicators for different reminders.
I feel this may be easier in home assistant but the matter server in home assistant sucks compared to apple home (thread aspect fails a lot, switches become unavailable even tho they are perfectly fine in apple home) that I haven’t messed with it yet either.
You can’t do it in iOS Home. In order to do this you need a “while” type looping structure in which you can test the conditions, change the bar color, and eventually exit the loop if all the alert conditions have completed. The closest you can in iOS is to convert the automation to a shortcut where you can do a “repeat” loop, but that is timed for a specified number of repeats, so it doesn’t do what you want.
You can do this type of automation in Home Assistant, so you might want to consider using Home Assistant as a second controller of this is a critical feature for you (nice feature of Matter is that you can use multiple controllers simultaneously).
This is one of those situations that a blue / red would be better suited to handle it since it can do led notifications per led. So you can set led to a different color based on different situations. That does require a Zigbee or Zwave hub respectively though.
The home assistant suggestion above is probably your best bet with the white series.
I guess another hack would be to assign one color for each of the three things
Then if 2 or more happen it could be a 4th, more serious color (such as red)
Then it would be up to the user to figure out what the two things are
You can get more complex too
Thanks everyone. This may wind up being more complex than I want to mess with. I may have to “distribute” messages across more than one Inovelli switch. Or wait for some LED notification bar with 2 or 3 distinctly addressable components.