White Series Dimmer (VTM31-SN) - Bug/Enhancement Thread

Please use this thread to comment on any bugs you find in the firmware and/or any enhancements you’d like to see made.

If you are having issues with your switch and require troubleshooting, please open up a separate thread so we can help. If it turns out to be a bug, we can capture it here.

Thanks!

2 Likes

A post was split to a new topic: mmWave - White Version Planned?

The only issue I’ve noticed so far is when you split the switch into its own tiles in Apple Home, the tile where you configure buttons 1, 2, and 3 for single double and long pushes disappears. Typically from other switches I’ve noticed that just sits in the settings of the switch itself, but it’s a separate tile here when the switch is combined and goes away completely until the switch is recombined into a “single” tile.


A post was split to a new topic: Thread > Zigbee / Zigbee > Thread

I was a bit confused by this as well. Initially the switches showed up under “Other” and I wasn’t sure what the 2 tiles were for, I was also curious why there was a regular light slider as well as an RGB slider when not setup for smart bulbs. I changed it to separate tiles which then treats them as lights in the home app, but I guess then you loose the ability to target the various switch states? It looks like changing the RGB slider changes the LED bar on the device which is cool, but saying “Siri turn on the lights in the theater” seems to change the RGB slider as well as the on/off state of the switch.

Single Tile:

Separate Tiles:

Change the name to something more unique so it doesn’t confuse them both as the names are similar. Name it as back door notification bar or something. That should help. Siri is stupid at best. There are many times I asked it to close or lock doors and the read back prompt of what I said is correct and Siri still asks who I want to call.

As for the switch states. You don’t lose it, it just disappears and I’m not sure if it’s by design or not but it’s still there just not visible when separate tiles. Whatever you assign will remain and anything you want to change requires you combine the switch back to single tile, make changes, then separate it again. Not a huge deal but I reported that because I don’t know if it’s a bug or not.

Good info, thanks!

I’ll play around with the naming. My understanding was that if you setup an accessory as a light then HomeKit categorizes it as a light regardless of the name. Then it’s suppose to understand the context of “lights” meaning every device categorized as a light. This mostly seems to work as I have lights in our kitchen that don’t have the “lights” in the name, but they turn on/off with the “lights” command.

Siri is stupid at best

My 9 year old is constantly asking me why Siri is so stupid. She does not like Siri :slight_smile:

Not sure if this is the right spot for this but …

So I installed a couple of switches and connected them to Home Assistant, etc… and everything was going great for about a day but now both switches appear unavailable. They still work locally but there’s no control in Home Assistant anymore. I tried rebooting them by flipping the breaker but they still won’t reconnect. I’ve got a few Matter+Thread Eve devices (battery powered) that are working fine. I’ll try factory resetting the switches here soon and see if that resolves the issues. Has anyone else had any issues with the switches staying connected to Home Assistant?

Also, in the meantime can anyone confirm that they do retain the thread network settings on power loss?

P.s. A feature request, would it be possible to expose a toggle that would enable or disable local control? One thing I was hoping for is to be able to disable the switch under certain conditions. i.e. lights out after 9pm, etc…

1 Like

Yes, they do.

That’s actually a great idea!

Not sure if this is a bug or a feature request:

I’ve set up the White switch, commissioned it on a couple fabrics and did the same for a Matter bulb (also Thread FWIW). I established a Matter Binding between the two. It works as expected when I physically push the paddle. But it does not trigger if I toggle the switch from a Matter controller. As a user I expect that if I bind it, it will always ripple its change to the bound devices regardless of whether it was instigated locally or remotely.

Following this response as I plan to experiment with a similar setup. What Hub did you use for the bindings? What is your original hub or one you shared it to after setup?

I used a Nest Hub as the first one (primarily b/c I was having a :poop: time trusting that I could tell IT what Thread creds to use, so I settled on letting it have its say and also using a spare phone that I could wipe the credentials to know exactly what’s being stored).

From there I shared the devices to Home Assistant where I could easily tell its TBR to use the same Thread creds and share the mesh. A single Thread mesh with 2 fabrics and 2 controllers.

Neither of those hubs support binding. HA intends to, when they come up for air. So not in the immediate future.

Instead I installed chip-tool on a Linux machine and shared the devices onto a third fabric and used chip-tool to handle the bindings. I wrote up the commands I used over here: Multiple Matter/Thread Dimmers should control one load - #6 by Mactalla - Matter/Thread - Home Assistant Community.

Happy to go into more detail if you wish, but probably in its own topic rather than this bug tracking thread :upside_down_face:

2 Likes

I have my dimmer connected only to power, and it’s in smart bulb mode. I added it to Homekit first, and then also paired it with my Home Assistant installation. I set up all my actions through the Homekit dimmer switch thing that lets you set up per button actions.

For the long press down, I have it set to run a scene that turns on some lights. For the single press down it runs a scene that turns off all lights in the room. If I long press down on the paddle the scene runs; however, I always have to single press down twice to get everything to turn off for some reason (press down, wait 2 seconds to be sure, press down again). The rgb strip turns off on the switch, but nothing else happens until I press down another time. I also tried with just assigning accessories instead of a scene, and the problem still occurs. I put the same scene on up long press and single pressing down once works and turns everything off. Anybody else having the same issue?

Also, on a side note is it possible to set the color of the RGB strip before turning it on so there isn’t a brief flash of the previous color?

Same, I was hoping for the exact same feature. I’ve installed just one switch at the moment to experiment with, and that’s a feature I need for a few specific deployments I have in mind. Seems kinda odd that it’s not exposed over Matter seeing as almost all of the other parameters are exposed.

My actual use case in mind is for a church (yeah we run Home Assistant at my church, pretty cool), and during services, the media and lighting team should be able to disable all local controls over the normal (non-DMX) sanctuary lights, while the team will control them exclusively from the media booth. Once service is over, local protection should be turned off again, and the switches should act as plain old dimmers.

I had the same issue. Connected to Home Assistant and it was working fine for about 4 hours, and then it lost connectivity and never came back. Going to reset and re-pair tonight.

This is my biggest complaint. You’re unlikely to find a naming convention that works consistently to avoid adjusting the LED bar when you use voice commands.

For this thread, I have two feature “requests” which could be firmware related:

  1. I couldn’t actually care less about the LED bar being controllable. It’d be nice to have a firmware setting to just make the LED bar unaddressable. All I really want is a switch that reliably responds to HomeKit scene and voice commands, and even though I’ve played with automations controlling the LED bar, I would happily give those up just to have the LED bar not glow bright white at me every time I use a voice command to control the lights.
  2. As an add on to #1, above, this might be able to be fixable with an LED default dim level (remote) function. If your LED default dim level (remote) was set to 0, then a remote command to turn the LED Bar “on” would ostensibly not turn it on, but a remote command to set a dim level would maybe turn it on. This needs testing with homekit
  3. The default out of the box behavior is for a single press to turn on or off, and long press to adjust dimming the longer you press it. The other smart dimmer I had was a double-press to go all up or all down, and single press(es) would adjust the dimming level. Could be nice to have an option like “single press mode” with the options be “on” or “adjust dim”. Then you could use the “2x tap up level” to do your on/off
1 Like

It finally came back online for me without any intervention but I had to wait about 24-36 hours.

I can’t confirm yet, but it seems like every time I manually turn the lights on or off at the switch itself it drops off the thread network.

I also see intermittent disconnects throughout the day, for no rime or reason. I’m using a SkyConnect for the radio with Open Thread Border Router running on my home assistant. So who knows it might just be my network.

Welp, I removed it from HA, reset the device, and re-paired it to HA. And now it’s duplicating the entities.

Inovelli team,

Congratulation on the launch.

I purchased and received 10x White Series from the initial batch and have another 10x on order.

A PSA for HomeAssistant users: I don’t believe HomeAssistant 2024.08 is interviewing devices the way it should. I had issues with this Inovelli device as well as my nanoleaf (downlight and bulb) and even the eve routers and sleepers….all going offline as I expanded my network with X new node. To fix this: I found that manually re-interviewing a majority of my network (in the matter server webpage of HomeAssistant) after I successfully commission a new device keeps this offline phenomena from happening. Just reinterview very aggressively, and you should be able to keep the network together without flying off the rails. I never had to do this in Apple HomeKit, but Home Assistant isn’t Matter/Thread certified yet, it’s still early days.

Also: for HomeKit users, items like the LED status bar can be hidden or omitted from voice commands by going to the item settings and disabling “Add to Home View”. When this is disabled, it is assumed that Siri will not match the item when executing commands. I can’t speak to how this works on other platforms.

For the white series, my feedback is below:

  1. The switch is very built well, I really have nothing but top remarks on the quality, and this was important for me….as I have an old house with weird gang boxes that have taken the lives of many Belkin Wemo in the past. I always held Lutron in the top spot on quality, and the White Series seems to be built and designed just as well (in my opinion, better). Nice job.
  2. We REALLY do need a way to disable the LED status bar’s built in signals - the default animations and their color, etc. 100% off, full disable. I have yet to install these in my bedroom because I know my wife will hate seeing this glow on the wall, as dim as it may be. I LOVE the way the status LED (when controlled on matter) works with tandem with the built in LED indications and animations on the device, but I absolutely need to get a way to DISABLE these animations and indications completely. Add a new color “OFF” to the nice assortment of options we already have.
  3. Firmware stability seems very solid for a 1.0.0, good job.
  4. Do we have minimum and maximum value parameters for dimming? I have not had the capacity to dive into the technical details and documentation with full scrutiny, but I certainly didn’t see it in HomeAssistant or in my casual scan of the manual. I have a chandelier that doesn’t illuminate at the bottom 20% and I’d love to fix this.
  5. Smart bulb mode is absolutely KILLER feature. I love this and will enable on almost half of my units.
3 Likes

Yes, it can be adjusted using the local configuration as documented in the online manual (it is one of the many parameters in the big table). I was able to set the effective dimmer brightness of 1% to be equivalent to 22%. The setting does not appear to be configurable via Matter right now.

1 Like