White Series 2-1 Home Assistant + Unifi Setup Issues

All, I am posting here my learnings regarding my first Inovelli Switch because I wish these were available to me before I started. Although I am using Home Assistant w/Unifi (L2/L3/WIFI) the below items are required by Thread and as such, should apply to your Hub/Network regardless of your manufacturer.

1. IPv6
The biggest issue I had in my 5 day journey (and roughly 40 hours of fun) is that Thread requires IPv6. This is well documented. However, although I consider myself fairly technically able, I do not have a solid understanding of IPv6 and, as such, I missed a crucial setting. IPv6 needs to be statically set if your ISP (and most don’t) does not supply IPv6 DHCP to your Router. Below is the screenshot of my Unifi IPv6 flat network. By “flat network” I mean my WIFI and Ethernet network is sharing the same L2 default VLAN and the same L3 IP Network.

(Image: Unifi IPv6 Static Settings)

IPv6 configuration was the last fix to get my White Series successfully registered as a Thread device in Home Assistant. However, I had a lot of frustrations previously described below.

2. White Series Switches Documentation
The documentation can be confusing and incomplete.

Example 1: the Reset procedures documented online (for the White Series) is different from the downloadable PDF manual (the same manual that comes in the box. Worse yet, both of those procedures are not fully complete. Inovelli responded in a thread in these forums with the correct procedure to reset the White Series Switches here: White Series - Factory Reset not working

Procedure: Press and Hold Up on the Paddle while simultaneously Press and Holding the Config Button for roughly 25 seconds or until the LED has gone through a Green state (about 7 seconds later), then to a Yellow State (about 15 seconds from the initial press and hold) and finally to a Red State (about 22-25 seconds from the initial press and hold).

This might sound trivial, however, the instructions state that a successful reset happens after the LED turns RED. This is incorrect, the successful reset doesn’t happen until you see a Cyan color followed by a Yellow color AFTER the last RED LED step (22-25 seconds after the initial press and hold). Simply adding this last piece of information is key to those of us who are new and literally reading the documentation. I spent hours the first two nights trying to understand why my White Series Switch wouldn’t reset because the last LED color I saw was a Yellow color not a Red color. I was having problems pairing to Home Assistant (mainly because of reason number one above) and thought I had a bad switch because it would not reset, while all along the Switch was resetting and the paring process to Home Assistant was ultimately related to IPv6 not setup correctly in my network. Not easy for my dumb self to understand in the heat of it.

Example 2: while the instructions to pair the White Series Switch to Home Assistant are technically accurate, they make major assumptions, and most importantly, assume everything else is setup correctly within your network (IPv6), your Thread Border Router (for me this was both a Apple Ipod Mini for Homekit (Thread) and two Aqara M3’s for Zigbee and Thread, and finally that your Hub (Home Assistant) has Thread correctly setup. If any of the previous three areas are misconfigured you may struggle to get the White Series Switch to connect to the Network. In my case, all the above was incorrectly setup or misconfigured. It took my hours and hours to understand this. Just a little bit of messaging in the Hub setup instructions from Inovelli would have saved me many hours of time because I had no idea any of these areas were misconfigured, and worse, I didn’t even know I had to look in these areas.

Example 3: the documentation of the various LED color flashing is lacking. I lost track of how many different LED color flashing cycles I ran across with no ability to find any thing close to matching sequences in the documentation for the Blue, Red, Black or White Series Switches. For example, I spent an entire evening trying to understand what a continuously blinking Cyan LED meant. Still don’t know what it really means, however, I figured out it was related to my Hue Smart Bulbs and so quickly ditched the HUE Smart Bulbs in place of incandescent for the troubleshooting processes. Documentation that Google could find telling me to ditch the Smart Bulbs until you have a working switch would have been really nice to see.

3. Thread Configuration
Oh boy, I had no clue what I was getting in to here. Thread is… new. Your HUB (Home Assistant for me) needs to have Thread configured correctly. Open up the Thread integration and hit configure.

You need to set your Preferred Thread Network. It is not set by default and until I set it my White Series Switch was just going to keep struggling trying to connect to the network. Thread Networks also had to have a preferred device (the icon that looks like a door with a key in it) when more than one Thread Border Router is in your Preferred Network. I did not have this set which caused me more hours of frustration.

Finally the dreaded Thread Credentials. Thread requires your Thread Network have credentials synced with your phone during the registration phase of a new Thread device. If you are using Apple Homekit as your Hub and having issues registering your device, save yourself a lot of pain (like I just went through) and create a brand new Homekit Home for use in the registration process. Apple has well documented bugs with respect to Thread and the Thread Network credentials getting out of sync with your smart phone. The only fix Apple has posted, so far, is to start a new Home. So, to eliminate this as your issue, just start a new Homekit Home and once you have your device working, go back to your correct home and re-add the new device.

Home Assistant struggles with the same issue and but it has a tool to help your phone get back in sync with your Hubs Thread Network. In the Home Assistant Companion App go to Settings → Troubleshooting → Syn Thread Credentials and sync them. This will allow your phone to register your Bluetooth enabled Thread device to Home Assistant.

4. 2.4ghz WIFI
During the registration process most Thread devices only support 2.4ghz WIFI networks. You must disable your 5 and 6 ghz networks for the registration process. I had so many problems over the last 5 days that I never did go back and confirm this is the case for the White Series Switches, however, the documentation states it is the case and, of course, for the first two days I didn’t isolate 2.4ghz on my WIFI, so, I’m guessing this was an issue at one point for me. I eventually removed 5 and 6 ghz for the registration process.

5. The Light Bulbs
Saving this for future update as I’m having major issues with my HUE Lightbulbs in this White Series Switch. More to come once I solve it.

:frowning:

Well there it is, my struggles with the Inovelli White Series Switch so far… I hope your journey is easier/faster than mine.

Best,
Jeff

2 Likes

You don’t actually need a ipv6 network to run these. Just need to allow ipv6 on your network. Used to be a check mark in the network page I think. Been a while since I configured my network and we’ve had some updates since. I don’t have a single ipv6 network active with 15 white switches currently and other matter over thread devices running on apple home and home assistant.

2 Likes

I finally had a minute to read the entire thing and you have some information wrong.

Their online manual is always updating and states at the bottom of the webpage that the pdf download may be out of date. The physical booklet is also out of date at that point.

Thread is not that new. It’s been available for a few years but it was not utilized very much since only apple embraced it back in 2020 I believe. Only became more popular after matter was announced.

Thread does not use 2.4ghz WiFi but does use the 2.4ghz band. Thread is a communication standard similar to Zigbee. It doesn’t use any WiFi nor is the switch equipped with any WiFi radios.

Also the reason you’re having issues with hue is PROBABLY (can’t know until you say what the issue really is) because you’re not able to bind the switch to the light after putting the switch into smart bulb mode so you likely need to write scripts for now until matter binding is available. In apple home you’ll need to use automations but may be easier with HA

I’m sorry you’ve had all these struggles, hope it start looking up.

3 Likes

Thank you! After several hours of struggling, you pointed me to the right place. I had to enable IPV6 on my UDM to get it to work. I have an Apple TV / HA / Unifi setup and disabled IPV6 a while back. I didn’t realize that Matter won’t work in an IPV4 environment.

Once I got my devices an IPV6 address, the White switch added through Apple TV as a Thread border router with no issues. Thank you!