Thank you! This is indeed super helpful! I added a bypass and now my lights can be turned off!
What is the limitation of not having the LED animations?
I understand that it is not part of the Matter “Dimmer Switch” device library requirements, but I understood those were a minimum for functionality and a manufacturer could add other features to their product to differentiate themselves. You already have done this with the Blue 2-1.
If that is not the case could you dual certify the White dimmer as a “Dimmer Switch” and an “Extended Color Light” (or 7 of them) as it appears the LED bar does everything required by an Extended Color Light?
@EricM_Inovelli – can you answer this?
@Carl – we have solid color notifications because we made an additional endpoint. But I’m not sure how we would add animated notifications. I’ll defer to the other Eric for the explanation.
Edit: For the record, I’d love it if we could get animated notifications so if we can get it to work, I’m all ears!
The reason that we currently don’t animate the notification is because the RGB endpoint does not have any attribute that could be used to represent the animation (chase, pulse, etc.). Mode select is an option here so it is something we could add to be supported in Hubitat and probably Home Assistant. For example, a mode select attribute could be used to tell the RGB endpoint to use a notification other than “solid”. If Apple and the other hubs update to properly support Mode Select then we could implement it there as well.
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Thanks for the clarification.
Instead of adding this as “Mode Select”, could you make each LED an “Extended Color Light”? Then the user would have individual LED control and could create the animation (i.e. blinking, etc ) through software control of each LED and no additional outside support would be needed for the functionality. I’m sure I am oversimplifying this but was looking for a way to keep all the blue functionality in the white series.
Project Update: Hitting a delay with Matter Certification. Idk what’s taking so long, but it’s now holding up production. We’ve gotten the switches assembled, but they need to receive a CD Certificate from the Matter Certification to burn onto the MG24 chip, so we are at a standstill until that’s completed.
I reached out to the CSA to see if there was some sort of expedited price we could pay, but they said there isn’t any way to do that. They could only promise they’d put this certification in front of the other ones we have in queue.
We are officially Thread Certified!
It should be up on Thread’s website within 3-5 business days (this was sent to us on the 15th).
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I will send out an email today letting everyone know the status and will keep everyone posted on the status of the Matter Certification and when production finishes.
As for an expected timeline, basically it’s a 3-4 week timeframe of when production finishes to when we have it here at HQ.
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Thanks for the update. It’s a bummer about the delay, bur hopefully it clears up soon.
I’ve preordered an additional 10, I can’t wait to get my hands on them.
Double bummer, but appreciate the transparency! Doubly waiting for my double order 
This is an interesting idea to consider. My two concerns are that 1) the user interface will get quite cluttered if all of the endpoints show up in your app (especially with multiple switches). You could end up having dozens of RGB devices if you have 7 for each switch. 2) There is still not a way to tell the LED to go into an “animation” like flash, pulse, etc. A really “hacky” way of doing it could be to add another dimmer endpoint with each level corresponding to a notification. 1% = solid, 2% = chase, 3% = pulse, etc. That may be a way to do it, but will add clutter as well (and might confuse people).
I agree it will not be pretty whatever way it is accomplished! My thought was not to have any animation in the switch (like it is now). Currently the switch LED bar can:
- Turn on
- Turn off
- Change color
With this the user could have the full LED bar blink a different color for a notification (garage door notification script):
-normal operation->garage open trigger->turn off LED bar->change color to red->turn LED bar on for 1s–>turn off for 0.5s-turn on for 1s->keep blinking until trigger is cancelled or door is closed ->turn off LED bar ->return to normal LED bar color->return LED bar to normal operation.
By making each individual LED an Extended Color Light then any combination of colors/intensities/scripts/speeds could be written to create whatever animation/notification the user can think of. This method does not require dependency of any outside company to someday provide support. Apple is notoriously bad at providing timely support for outside feature requests.
As you stated this is much more cumbersome but should provide full control. You obviously have more insight into how fast companies are updating feature requests and then how many months/years before it is implemented.
That is just my outside view (not always based in reality).
FWIW, I don’t want this if it’s going to make the UI in Apple home a mess for 95% of users so that the 5% power users can fiddle away. Honestly, I don’t even really care for the LED bar. I’m sure I’ll find one or two triggers for it, but…. Meh.
What I want is a simple, good looking paddle switch set that works with dimmers, on/off and ceiling fans; supports HomeKit out of the box without making me sign up for yet another cloud service; and isn’t noticeably slower or more complicated to use than a physical switch.
That’s what I believe Inovelli is building with the white series, and I encourage you to stick with It.
Creating more than one endpoint per switch makes me have to train my family to use them from their phone, or mucks up the ui in home, or worse maybe confuses Siri.
Anyone who wants all that other stuff already has it with the blue/red series; and those are exactly the sort of people that are willing to put in the extra expense and time and effort to put in a hubitat and all the associated scripts and gateways. I am. It that person (used to be, but now I’m old!)
Please don’t try to make white series all things to all people. If you do make a power user version of it, please don’t do it at the expense of having a simple one that I don’t have to explain to my wife and kids.
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I’m genuinely curious, is this an apple home limitation? I’m not familiar with it as I stopped using anything apple several years ago. I currently use Homeseer and am thinking of switching to Home Assistant. But the number of devices-features I have has nothing to do with my UI. My current system is relatively small with both Z- Wave and Zigbee devices, but each device has many features and or a child/sub devices. I just checked and there are pages and pages of devices and features (over 260) and I could add another 200 and my UI would not change until I decided to add something to it. My front porch motion sensor has about 10 parameters, but I don’t see any of them on my interface, it is only there to raise and lower the light dim level with motion. If I do want to see a particular feature they are grouped with tags by floor, room, feature etc.
You should check out the Kasa (TP-Link) Matter switches. A guy was just telling me about an estate he manages with over 120 Matter switches and bulbs using apple home. He did say there were some apple home Matter limitations that required 3rd party apps to fill the void. But he was able to get everything working! I looked at the Kasa switches for an immediate solution but there too simple for my needs. That is why Inovelli switches stand out from the competition, they are normal looking switches that are feature rich. I wouldn’t ask Porche to make a car more like a Chevy.
I have a couple of Zooz switches which are simple paddle switches with no extras but are very reliable. Might be worth checking out if you just want basic on/off/dim. I plan on installing dozens of Inovelli switches in my new home - either Blue or preferably White (hopefully with the same feature set). Unfortunately, I’m starting wiring next week and will have to install dumb switches until a clear path forward emerges with chipsets and features.
I don’t know, but the demo video linked above showed two HomeKit buttons in the native UI. One for the load and one for the light bar. If this turns into 9 by default, I think it’ll be a bad experience. Just my $0.02 and the “IF” in both my original comment and this one are going a lot of work.
These use WiFi, which has a bad reputation for reliability and responsiveness with HomeKit (along with Leviton). The generally accepted “good” solutions on the HomeKit forums are: Luton Caseta (which is proprietary AND ugly), or Inovelli with a hubitat (which requires a hub with HomeKit still being a beta feature)
These use WiFi, which has a bad reputation for reliability and responsiveness with HomeKit (along with Leviton). The generally accepted “good” solutions on the HomeKit forums are: Luton Caseta (which is proprietary AND ugly), or Inovelli with a hubitat (which requires a hub with HomeKit still being a beta feature)
I know this is getting slightly off-topic, but this isn’t actually true. My Lutron Caseta switches are slower to respond than my Leviton D215S wifi-homekit on/off switches (both are acceptably responsive, though).
Also, worth noting that Lutron Caseta also has an obnoxious shortcoming that no one talks about, which is that when turned “on” from HomeKit (or it’s own native app) it always ramps up to 100%, whereas pretty much every other smart device on the market will turn on to the last known brightness level (hopefully the innovelli switches operate similarly). Re-caseta “ugliness” the new Caseta Diva dimmers actually look similar to the Innovelli switches, with the exception that the dimmer has a physical slider.
As an aside, I wish the inovelli switches had a slider or touch based dimming. Having to hold the switch and time it to get to the dimming level you want seems like a shortcoming. Oh well, trade-offs everywhere.
This can be set as a parameter so you get to choose what happens.
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I suffered with this for a while and have some insights. The problem™ seems to often boil down to mdns multicast/broadcast traffic issues. Somewhat amusingly, this seems particularly common for folks with UniFi systems. There was a nasty UniFi bug found a few years ago that was fixed in the 5.x firmware. I have a suspicion that it has regressed in the 6.x firmware for certain hardware (such as U6-LR). Additionally, there was a widespread bug (now fixed) in the mdns implementation used in the esp-idf toolkit that also caused mdns problems.
If you have wifi HomeKit/Matter devices that stop working in HomeKit (like Leviton, TP-Link) but still work in the manufacturer’s app, then multicast/broadcast issues would be prime suspect - it affects mdns which HomeKit relies on.
My suggestion for UniFi users (and U6-LR in particular): find the setting for “group rekey interval” and turn it off (zero seconds). While this does represent a slight weakening of security settings it is effectively inconsequential with the non-enterprise PSK modes used in most home environment.
You can create a separate wifi unifi SSID for your homekit/iot devices, but ironically, multiple SSIDs provoked the unifi group rekeying bug.
I switched from UniFi UAP-AC to U6-LR devices last year and my homekit setup went to hell. I could expect a homekit meltdown in as little as 1-2 hours. The longest was 6 days. Since turning off group rekeying, it’s gone 21 days without a hiccup. It isn’t proof, but it is looking compelling here. Moving the devices back to a UAP-AC network in an earlier experiement also fixed it.
TL;DR UniFi users with WiFi homekit/matter unreliability can try turning off “group rekey interval”. It might save some sanity while waiting for your White switches to ship. If it can save some spouse aggro then it’s worth the experiement.
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Thank you for all the extra detail. I actually have a UI router, but am using TP-Link Deco APs. No setting I can find in the deco app for group rekey.
I’ve been so adamantly against having my switches registered with a cloud service, I’ve been using them in HomeKit mode only. I will see about registering one with Leviton’s service which may help diagnose. it’s true that a WiFi reboot basically always fixes them for some period of time. I only installed the three switches and just haven’t expanded them due to reliability issues.
In reality, though, I’m just banking on the white series solving all of my problems.
Just wanted to give a quick update here as I know we’re coming to the home stretch. After a week and a half of no contact from the CSA (certifying committee for Matter), I received an email (after I bugged them again and again for an update) stating that the manufacturer uploaded a document that was not signed by the testing house and that was the only thing they are waiting for.
I immediately rectified the situation that evening and sent over a signed document from the manufacturer:
I sincerely hope it doesn’t take another 1.5 weeks to get a response as it’s getting really frustrating at how slow this process has been.
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Production has been halted for weeks now waiting for this certification to complete as the manufacturer cannot flash the firmware on the switches without a special certification from the CSA. As I mentioned before, they have completed all the hardware components of the switch, they’re just waiting to flash the final firmware on it.
I did receive a hardware sample from production and love it:
Yes, that is a, “Positive Potato” in the background from my fiancee… it keeps me positive during these frustrating moments haha.
I will make sure to keep everyone updated once we get the final go ahead from the CSA.
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Awww that’s adorable. And thanks for the update!
Will there be one included in the box of each production switch? 
Then again, including anything marked “positive” in the box may be interpreted that the contents are rated for DC…
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