White Series Dimmer - Notification Bar in Smart Bulb Mode

Apologies if this is addressed somewhere else, but I’ve tried searching all posts, and I can’t quite find an answer.

In the middle of installing about 28 White dimmer switches (and about 8 aux switches) throughout my home to control approx. 40-50 Nanoleaf bulbs, and having trouble figuring out what to do with the White dimmer’s notification bar in Smart Bulb Mode (SBM), when using Homekit as my main interface, and using Siri (through HomePod Minis) to voice control the bulbs, in groups, very frequently (with the White dimmers as backups, especially when guests stay).

Before enabling SBM, it seems like the dimmer’s default notification bar activity is dim blue when the load/light is off and brighter blue when the load/light is on. When I first enabled SBM, and started using both the switches and Siri, I realized that the notification bar was getting tripped by most of my Siri voice commands, and ending up showing solid white most of the time. So I dug into the forum threads and learned all about naming the dimmers something different from my bulbs, moving the dimmers to a separate virtual “room” in Homekit called “Switches”, and even how to separate out the two notification bar “accessory” lights that show up in Homekit and name them different things (one for load, one for notifications, to help keep them straight).

Even with all of that, I’m having a hard time understanding what to do with the notification bar.

If I add the load portion of the notification bar to my paddle automations, I can get pretty close to results that make sense.

For instance, if I want the notification bar to serve as a night light to help find the switch in the dark, but then turn off when the bulb group is turned on, I can: (1) set down (button 2) to trigger the bulb group to turn off and trigger the load portion of the notification bar to turn on; and (2) set up (button 1) to trigger the bulb group to turn on and trigger the load portion of the notification bar to turn off (incidentally, I use up (button 1) to turn the bulb group on at 50% and I use config (button 3) to turn the turn the bulb group on at 100%, because I like the default people choose to be 50%, when they instinctively go to press up, but also having the option to get to 100% easily using the config button - for both of these, I can set the same triggers to turn off the load portion of the notification bar, for that night light-style behavior).

Similarly, I can vary the above to have a dim load notification bar when the paddle turns the bulb group off, and a bright notification bar when the paddle or config turns the bulb group on - if I wanted behavior similar to the out of the box switch, when not in SBM (and actually controlling the load).

But all of this desyncs when I use Siri to control the bulb groups. Although I can stop the solid white with the above steps - because the notification bar now doesn’t overlap in naming with the bulb group names or actual room names, and all the switches are in their own virtual room (named “Switches”), that means I have the opposite problem - now, when using Siri to control the bulbs, the notification bar remains unaffected, and never changes from whatever state it’s in.

I’m trying to understand if I’m missing something obvious - some way of having the notification bar function intuitively out of the box, in SBM, whether I’m controlling bulbs from the switch or from Siri. Are there tricks to naming and room groupings that I haven’t thought of? My first instinct was “no”, because even if I can name just the load potion of the notification bar something similar to my bulb groups (or experiment more with what room to place the switches in), that would seem to only get me the ability to use voice commands to turn the notification bar on when bulb groups get turned on, and to turn the notification bar off when bulb groups get turned off - and that’s far away from the logic I want; I don’t want a dark notification bar in a dark room, so at least that potion needs to have flipped logic.

Or do I have to delve into other areas of Homekit, like automations, and instead of using the dimmer triggers to control the notification bar (which only seem to impact switch presses), do I have to set up complex automations that trigger notification bar activities based on bulb group states, for each bulb group, for each state, and for each switch? With over 40 bulbs and 28 switches (including some in multi-way setups), this feels like it’s going to be a big lift to set up and maintain (and especially keeping that many notifications distinct).

If there aren’t any tricks I’m missing, are there any plans for firmware updates that could make SBM more intuitive to implement in setups where physical paddle presses live alongside voice commands?

Thanks for all help/suggestions!

I’m wondering the same thing with about 70 switches. Have you come up with a workable solution for syncing the LED bar with the smart bulb state?

No - ended up with around 40 switches myself, but I never did figure out how to easily sync the notification bar with voice commands to a home assistant, across that many bulbs and switches. I just ended up setting the notification bar to be on all the time as a sort of night light, and easy way to find the switches, and gave up on trying to have the notification bars turn off when the bulbs are on.

If I understand your issue correctly, when you turn on a smart bulb with Siri, you want the switch to also light up as on. And vice versa.

There are two controls for the LED bar. One is somewhat automatic when you tap the paddle or otherwise turn the switch on/off. The other is for notifications. In your case, I think you are just wanting the bar to be dim when the smart bulb it’s hooked up to is off, and bright when on.

The only solution I’ve found is to use home assistant that detects a state change of the bulb and if the bulb turns off, I turn off the corresponding switch. Or vice versa. I accomplish this in Node Red quite easily. I realize that if I turn on the smart bulb with the switch, that is also triggering this automation, which is a little redundant. But so far I haven’t seen a reason to adjust the automation in order to take care of this.

I haven’t tried it, but there’s a way in Apple automations to trigger an action when a device turns on or off. When creating an automation, look for the trigger “when an accessory is controlled.” It looks to me like you might have to do two automations – one for on and one for off. A little more cumbersome, but it should work.