(Looks like we need to add some tags for the white switches)
Hello! Received my 2-1 White switches today and managed to get a room wired up before bedtime… still had to do it in the dark, but I was too excited to wait.
I see the 2 linked switches… I’m using smart bulb mode, so I get that the scene controller is on the right and lights for the notification panel are on the left…
I tinkered with them briefly, and by changing the colors of each, turning the light on with Siri made the bar blue, while using the switch made it white. Not sure if that’s right? In smart bulb mode, should the left control be hidden?
Can the names of the “switches” be controlled independently? When I want to trigger a notification via an automation, this will cause confusion.
Hey great questions – I’ll update the Knowledge-Base with the answers as well.
@harjms is correct, Button 3 is the favorites button located at the top right of the switch.
Button 1 = Up Button
Button 2 = Down Button
Button 3 = Favorites
I wish Apple would let us name them, but it seems to be a limitation at this time.
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I don’t have my iPhone with me right now, so I can’t play with the rest of the settings to answer the other questions as it seems like a few things have changed since I wrote them initially. But I will be home later tonight and can get you some answers if no one else chimes in first.
Oh yeah, I use it on my 2-1 Red Dimmers for all sorts of automations. Controlling groups of lights, a hot water recirculation pump, clearing notifications, etc etc.
So the names can be controlled independently. From the screen with the two light bars displayed hit the gear icon. In the following screen there will be an Accessories menu item. Click that. Find the LED Bar control, it will be the one with color control when you view it. Hit the gear icon again and then change the name. I can post pictures if you are still having trouble with these instructions. Here is the end result for one of the light switches I installed here.
I am having some issues with my thread network right now so I can’t really test this, but I believe if the switch is in smart light bulb mode the light on the left does nothing. The physical buttons on the switch trigger automations that control the light bulb so it really doesn’t need to do anything because any action triggered by the switch in the smart home platform could be triggered by you in the home app. I have three inovelli switches in the home currently. Two are multiway with dumb switches to just give me on and off for some lights in the stair wells of my home and one is one way in smart mode. They all appear in the app with the left bar like you would expect for a dimmer but none have dimmer functionality enabled. So in my case adjusting the left light for the smart switch does nothing, and adjusting the left light for multi-way lights will turn those lights on at 1% or greater and off at 0%. Or at least that is how I recall it all working before my thread network died again today, which I don’t have any belief was related to the white switches and is instead an apple problem I have been having for months.
So, upon playing with the sliders, both seem to control the notification LED bar. The left is the dimness and “height”. The right is color. I don’t understand why they’re different…
I’m also confused about setting the color. I’m trying to set the color for “on” and “off”, and it just resets to blue.
The left one will actually dim the lights. The “height” change is the indication of how dimmed the switch is.
The right one is the notification bar.
You do have change the switch to act as a dimmer to see the dimming effect happen otherwise regardless of what percentage you put it too, it will automatically correct itself to 100% within a minute or so if the switch is in on/off function.
To change the indications color of the light you have to do manually thru the switch since HomeKit doesn’t have that ability yet, apple limitation.
You really should read thru the guides they have posted online, it answers all of this.
On top of all that, if you go to the settings of the switch in apple home app, and click show as separate tiles, it will allow you to work the switch with a simple tap instead of opening up into that menu every time.
I guess the bar dimming is supposed to represent the light dimming? I have the switch in smart bulb mode, and I’m not seeing any dimming on the light itself. Interacting with the right bar does change the color, but it blips back to the default blue.
As for the tiles being separate, I actually like them grouped.
When the switch is in the SBM, it is locked into putting out full power. Working the paddle will not affect the wired load. So instead of addressing the switch for on/off and dim levels, you need to address the smart bulb directly to turn in on or off or dim it.
Though I don’t use it in smart bulb mode, from my understanding you now have to write automations and assign them to either single press double press or long hold on each button. I don’t believe apple home supports any way to button hold while it brings brightness up and down the whole time you’re holding. Something like that should be supported in home assistant but for apple you’ll have to write “if” statements to get where you want as far I’m aware. The switch is doing what it’s supposed to do. When the notification bar is on, it will show the brightness change temporarily and then go back to showing the notification bar.
The switch has no way of knowing what bulb it’s controlling when smart bulb mode is on so you have to write those automations.
It would need to be something like “when accessory is controlled” switch set to 40%, “then” set bulb xx to 40%
Yeah, all this tracks. I’m just acclimating to what’s currently possible (within the confines of t/m and apple home), and what may be plausible in the future.
Has anyone figured out how to get consistent behavior of the LED bar with Siri commands.
I just received my order yesterday and got them installed today, and when using Siri voice commands, I get inconsistent behavior of what happens with the LED light bar.
For some of my switches, “Hey Siti, turn the Kitchen Table Light On” will turn on the load, but not the LED bar.
For some of my switches, “Hey Siri, turn the Deck Entry Light on” will turn on both the load and the LED bar.
For some of my switches, “Hey Siri, turn the dining room light on” will turn them both on, but not at the same time (probably HomeKit being weird).
“Turn on all the lights in the kitchen” will usually turn on both the load and the LED bar for all switches in the kitchen.
“Turn off all the lights in the kitchen” will likewise turn off both the load and the LED light bar for all switches in the kitchen.
See this quick video on YouTube:
I have consistently left the load named “Light” and the LED bar named “LED Bar”, as that’s the first setup I had success with.
It does not seem to matter if it’s in Dimmer or on/off mode. It does not seem to matter if I’m having them show up as one tile in HomeKit or not.
I can’t seem to move the LED bar to a different room without also moving the load.
My preferred behavior would be for the LED bar to never turn on with voice commands, but preserve the ability to use it in automations. It’d also be nice to get the LED bars to disappear from basically all the default views in the home app.
I’ll continue to play around, but very curious if anyone else already knows what to do so I don’t have to figure it out. Next thing I was going to play with was setting the default LED intensity when on to 0. It’d be nice if we had insight to the Apple black magic behavior so I can make it do something predictable without training my family.
@dudo – thanks for brining this up – I just updated the instructions for the Apple Home setup. Hopefully it explains things better. It still had some of the beta instructions in there and Apple updated their platform in between beta and launching. Hopefully all is square now, but I’m happy to change anything if you (or anyone else) is still confused. I think a lot of the confusion stems from the, “workarounds” we had to do to get the advanced features to work since technically Apple and the other hubs do not have built in support for them.
The left one controls the dim level of the load attached to it (ie: slide it up and the light bulb attached to the switch gets brighter, slide it down, it gets dimmer). The right one controls the color and intensity level of the LED Bar. In other words, you can slide the right bar up and the LED Bar gets brighter, whereas if you slide the right bar down, it gets dimmer.
There is some confusion here and hopefully Apple will allow parameter changes via their app and we can hide this slider bc it’s actually pretty pointless, but there really isn’t a need for this slider as the point of it is to add an endpoint so that you can set up Color Notifications.
To permanently change the intensity, color, or on/off behavior of the LED Bar, you need to do it locally at the switch (since there’s no way to do it in the app). Those configurations can be found here:
Dang, I just typed all that out and then saw you answered it haha. Thanks!
Yeah, this is unfortunately a limitation with Apple (and all other Matter hubs we’ve tested). With Zigbee/Z-Wave, when you set it to Smart Bulb Mode, and then use Zigbee Bindings or Z-Wave Associations, the LED Bar can track the light bulb intensity and will adjust accordingly. Matter has Bindings as well, but none of the hubs support it right now. Once they do, we can push an update that will allow the LED Bar to track the light level.
I think the only workaround at this point is to setup an automation that says, “if Smart Bulb = x%, then turn on LED Bar to x%”. In other words, you won’t be able to see in real time via the LED Bar what level the smart bulb is at, but once you get your smart bulb to the level you want, the LED Bar will follow via an automation. I can work on a help article for this.
Yeah, this is my bad, I should’ve put a call out on the initial page that said not to use the right slider to set the color permanently. I just updated the page to say that if you want the color of the LED Bar to be permanent, you’ll have to change it via local configuration. It’s a really dumb implementation, but all hubs seem to want to show all the endpoints which leads to a lot of confusion.
Dangit, I did it again – you summed it up perfectly!
Question for you – does the LED Bar turn on at the light switch itself (i.e., the UI does not turn on the LED Bar light, but the physical switch turns the LED Bar on)?
I’m guessing what’s happening is the LED Bar on your physical switch turns on blue (the default color), but it doesn’t turn on to whatever color you’ve set it to on the LED Bar on the right in the UI. Is that correct?
If so, then again, I want to apologize for not putting this in the initial instructions, but if what you’re trying to accomplish is to have the switch turn on and the LED Bar turn a color other than the default blue, then you have to set this behavior via local configuration.
So, for example, if you wanted to turn on your Kitchen Light via Siri and have the LED Bar turn White, you would do the following:
Do not use the slider on the right in the UI for color control
Then look at the example in the above link (it should walk you through how to setup how to change the LED Bar color)
Here’s a GIF for reference:
A full list of the configuration options can be found here:
Let me know if that’s what you’re trying to accomplish and again, really sorry for all the confusion!
Edit: I have vacation brain on right now as I’m about to head out for vacation and I didn’t read what you were trying to accomplish. Let me see if I can help:
If you want the default blue to not turn on when the switch is on, what you can do is set the intensity level of the LED Bar to 0% when the light is on and off.
To do this, follow that link above that leads you to the Local Configuration Options and you’ll want to set the following parameters to 0:
Parameter #10 - LED Indicator Intensity (When On)
Parameter #11 - LED Indicator Intensity (When Off)
Then when you set up a color notification, in Step 10, make sure the brightness is set to whatever intensity you want.
Hope that makes sense?
I haven’t tried this myself yet (having the LED Bar off by default, but having it on for Notifications), but in theory this should work.
Hey Eric. Thanks for the reply and your patience typing out detailed parameter and configuration changes that are sub-optimal on the home platform, and already referenced in your documentation. I do understand how to change the behavior in the switch per the parameters (I think, haven’t done it yet). This is about Apple Home behavior catching the LED bar as a “light” that is included in voice commands in an unpredictable way.
The physical switch sets the light bar per the parameters. This is voice control referencing the lights in a room or area.
No, this would be ideal, consistent, and expected based on what I understand the switch is doing. What’s happening instead is that voice commands control both the load and the light bar per whatever Siri would set it to, which by default is bright white and 100%.
So for example, if I say “hey siri, turn the dining room light on”, the behavior is as follows:
The LED bar flashes white when it turns on (because Siri just set it to white @ 100%)
The load starts to ramp up, and the LED bar turns blue and ramps with it
When the load is done ramping, the LED bar goes back to bright white, and then stays that way until I turn it off with HomeKit or Siri. It’s more like a color notification than anything the switch is doing.
There’s another implication of this, which is related to automations. I have an automation to turn an LED bar to orange when the garage is open, and to green when the garage closes. That’s great. But if I then say “hey siri, turn off all the inside lights”, it turns off all the LED bars as well (until the next time a automation catches one).
The net net of this is that when I use voice commands, most of my switches are also glowing bright white at me when the load is on (vs the blue that you’d expect per the parameters you mention above.
Ah ok, I see what you’re saying. Sorry for the misinterpretation on my end.
Hmmm… Let me get some eyes on this from our beta team. I, unfortunately, picked the worst time to have the White Series come in as it lined up with my annual trip up north, so I’m out of the office until next Monday so I can’t test some ideas on how to fix this. Ironically, exactly a year ago on this same vacation was when I got a message about creating a Matter switch that sparked the development of this switch.
Hang in there, we’ll come up with a solution, be it something I’m just overlooking right now, or by looking at firmware options.
I have no doubt. I think your approach to development is what made me so confident preordering such a significant number of switches.
I work in technology myself, so happy to interface directly with anyone on your team that would be helped by interacting with me.
The ideal state would be for the LED light to have some sort of attribute that indicates that it’s a “non-primary load” or “status indicator” that would cause HomeKit to exclude it by default. Not sure what the thread/matter spec supports.
I think basically all my issues so far have to do with how HomeKit interacts with and represents the devices. Another example is the way the switches show up. They have no use in the home app other than configuring the behavior of the buttons, but I can’t separately exclude them from favorites or the UI.
