I recently purchased several VZM30 Blue On/Off switches for our bedrooms that only have one wall switch. I selected this switch instead of the dimmer model because several outlets are controlled via the wall switch.
My use case is I have a few lights with smart bulbs connected to an outlet downstream of the switch. I currently have the switch set to smart bulb mode. I’d like to be able to hold the paddle up/down on the VZW30 to control their brightness but this doesn’t seem to be working. Is there a way to configure this control? I have endpoint 2 of the switch bound to the level control of the lights. When I adjust the “brightness” of the switch in Z2M it properly adjusts the downstream light brightness. The paddles don’t adjust the local brightness value of the switch or the bound light brightness.
I am able to use switch endpoint 3 in the fan control mode to sort of do what I want but I’d much rather be able to hold the paddles.
Since I can’t seem to get the switch itself to dim a bound Hue bulb’s brightness up/down, I have been exploring workarounds in HA. I’d still much prefer if the switch itself could do this via bindings rather than needing support logic on my coordinator.
With that said, I wanted to report on my workaround findings so far. I was able to set some MQTT/set actions on button holds and think I have encountered a potential firmware bug: the MQTT “brightness_move” parameter works as expected for positive values but negative values don’t have any impact on the brightness value. “brightness_step” works as expected in both the positive and negative directions.
This sounds like a regression in the production firmware. This is definitely something I tested in a beta unit and it worked fine. @EricM_Inovelli FYI.
I believe this is the same as a known bug that @EricM_Inovelli and I found during beta and is already tagged in the github for a future update.
Thank you for the response Rohan and for confirming that these aren’t expected behaviors! Please let me know if I can provide any logs or run any tests to help out with identifying root cause. My setup can reliably reproduce the behaviors noted in my post.
@Bengineer I just grabbed a new production VZM30-SN and bound to an individual Hue bulb and it is working correctly. The things I changed as far as settings:
output mode set to 0 (this is dimmer mode) It doesn’t actually convert it to a dimmer, it just makes it act like a dimmer to bound devices.
Thank you very much for looking into this! I’m glad to hear there’s a setting that can be changed. Interestingly enough, I do not see the output_mode setting in Z2M for the VZM30-SN. I had looked previously for that setting after seeing it in other Inovelli documents and did not see it exposed. I assumed it was not supported!
Hmmm, I wonder how it got left out. I’ll work on getting a PR to get it added. In the meantime, can you change the mode via the Dev console for the device:
You both are the best, thank you! I was able to adjust the output mode with the dev console and can confirm it’s working as expected. Not a firmware bug!
Closing things out on my end, the only other outstanding issue from this thread was the negative brightness_step value not working as expected. Rohan mentioned this is already known and tagged for an update.
I just double checked on Github. It looks identical to https://github.com/InovelliUSA/Beta-VZM31-SN/issues/161 (private link for @EricM_Inovelli to take a look at) which applies to the VZM31 (Blue Dimmer). Since the on/off and the dimmer share a lot of the same firmware code, my guess is they both have the same bug.
FYI, @rohan PR for the z2m fix has been merged and should be in the development branch of the z2m docker image. It should make it into production beginning of August.