White Series Dimmer, multi-Admin

Product Support
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1

I have a White Series Dimmer connected to an Apple TV 4k. I have that device shared through Matter to Home Assistant. In the same room I have 2 lamps (set up as a Zigbee group), connected to HA but routed back to HomeKit.

I had the button presses set up through Apple Home, 1 press for Light+Lamps, double press for Lamps only. For the most part that worked very well, but I had noticed some weirdness with the lamps sometimes turning off and then back on right away, plus I wanted to use the config button to turn on something in HA, so I decided to move all of the button presses to HA automations. Which worked until it didn’t. The HA automations seemed to be triggering randomly.

I think the culprit is the multi-Admin, and running Tailscale on the Apple TV. Since the Apple TV is the thread boarder router, I noticed my Thread devices get extremely unreliable in Home Assistant whenever I turn on Tailscale. I think it’s improved over the years, as it seems like devices reconnect to HA pretty quickly, I think that’s why those various HA were triggering. Like this morning, there were 3 “config” events triggered, and around those same times the device became unavailable.

I don’t think this is an Inovelli issue. I think it’s a Tailscale issue. I just wanted to put the information here, incase others had issues.

2

My approach is:

  • Pair Matter devices only with HA.
  • Don’t use multi-Admin
  • Publish Devices from HA to Homekit using the Homekit Bridge.
  • Run HA on the fastest device you can afford.
  • Unless simply not possible do all your automations in HA. Don’t have automations on the same device on both HA and Homekit (too easy to get yourself confused).
  • Don’t run any network related software on any Apple Device that is not made by Apple.
  • Connect all AppleTVs to your network with Ethernet if at all possible. Put them on a UPS if at all possible.
  • Connect your HA box to your network with Ethernet.
  • if you have to use Wifi For AppleTV or Homepod use 5G only (not 2.4G), split the SSIDs on your network to make this work.
  • Ensure that the 2.4Hz Wifi portion of your network is locked to channel 1 or 6 do not use “Auto”. If your router cannot do this get a different one that can.
  • If at all possible don’t use any Thread router capable devices not made by Apple or Inovelli

I’m sure others will have a different view but the above works for me.