White LED strip not working (appears red) on LZW31

I recently finished updating the firmware on my LZW30, LZW30-SN, and LZW31 switches (all my LZW31-SN’s are from the newest batch, and shipped with the latest firmware), and have been experimenting with the new “White (Firmware 1.45+)” color option for the LED indicator/strip. So far, white seems to work as expected on all my LZW30 and LZW30-SN switches, as well as my brand-new LZW31-SN’s. But for all of my LZW31 (Black Series) dimmers, selecting White actually gives me a red LED strip.

I wanted to check: is the white color supported in the LZW31? (If the answer is “no”, that’s OK, as I only intend to use white for notifications, not for the main LED color, and white is working for me with all the -SN’s. This is more a matter of curiosity, since white does show as an option in the settings page for all four switch types. (Interestingly, another thing different about LZW31 is that the “custom color” option is missing from the parameters settings page, but shows in the LZW30, LZW30-SN, and LZW31-SN pages, even though the parameter seems to work the same way across all four devices.)

If it is supported, then I’m trying to figure out if this is a DTH issue, an issue with Target 1 not getting flashed correctly (there doesn’t seem to be any way, either from the hub or from the PC-Controller software, to check the current version of Target 1), or something else entirely. I am currently using SmartThings (v3 hub, firmware 000.031.00004). For the Inovelli switches, firmware and DTH versions are as follows:

  • LZW30: Firmware 1.19, DTH 2020-07-13
  • LZW30-SN: Firmware 1.19, DTH 2020-08-14
  • LZW31: Firmware 1.48, DTH 2020-08-12
  • LZW31-SN: Firmware 1.48, DTH 2020-08-14

(BTW, it seems like the “Raw Description” in the SmartThings IDE shows the firmware version when the switch was included, but “Current States” shows the firmware currently installed.)

I had the opposite issue when I installed the black series dimmer (red would show as white). There was an update to the Hubitat driver to fix that and the instructions said to make sure to change the “child” device (the LED) to RGBW (it would select RGB previously) if you were upgrading from a previous version of the driver. Also, there was a new custom command (setColorTemperature) that needed to be used to set to “white”. Without that, “red” would show as “white”. Is there a similar setup in ST?

According to this … LZW31 firmware history, the white LED support was added in 1.45. If you’re already using the latest handlers as @rakeshg mentions, I’ve seen multiple comments where target 1 needed to be flashed multiple times before it seemed to take hold … the White LED strip requires that to be properly flashed; but like you said, there is no way to tell.

Yes exactly this @jmason888 - this is usually the culprit!

OK, I’ll give it a try with the LZW31’s that I’m replacing with LZW31-SN’s (and moving to a different location in the house). For those ones it won’t be a big deal to exclude them so I can flash them with the Z-Stick on a separate network. I’ve even built a test rig for doing this kind of thing (e.g., flashing a switch before I install it): a surface-mount junction box with a three-wire device cord (like the kind for desktop computers) attached. I can wire the switch to hot, neutral, and ground (no load), mount it in the box, and plug the box in. When I’m done, I just unplug the box and take the switch out.

It DOES seem odd that the Target 1 flash failed to take on all four of my LZW31’s… but there’s no real way to know if it took except that the white works? It’s too bad there’s no way for the Target 0 firmware when it boots to query Target 1 and find out what it’s running.

Not entirely odd … I had a problem flashing some LZW42s, after a dozen seemingly successful flashes (that didn’t work),it turned out there was a problem with the utility that was doing the flashing - so all my attempts just silently failed the same way.

If you have another method at your disposal that you could try, it might be worth the effort.

So now I feel pretty foolish: It was a problem with the flashing… not with the version of PC-Controller, but with the version of the firmware. I was trying to flash Target 1 with LZW31_Holtek_1.39.bin rather than LZW31_1.47.bin because it came later in the alphabetically-sorted directory listing (rather than checking the digits). When I flashed the correct Target 1 firmware on one of my (loose) LZW31’s, the flash took perfectly the first time. Now I’m going to try flashing the other ones using the secondary controller method first, because if that works I won’t need to re-create all my automations, etc…

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