Okay, so having had these in place for a few weeks, I can’t say how disappointed I am in how poorly HomeKit handles them. That said, HomeKit handles them poorly because the switch is designed for power users that want light bar functionality and are willing to put in the extra time to work around the fact that fundamentally, having a switch with two lights on it is stretching the matter spec to the edge of how it was designed. Yes, we can wish that apple had reasonable ways to ignore/disable/or better organize complex thread/matter devices. But it’s also true that the innovelli devices are at the upper end of the complexity scale.
So, here’s the universe of solutions I’ve come up with:
Workarounds I have available to me today:
- Add a homeassistant
- Come up with a naming convention (e.g. “Dimmer” vs “LED Bar”), and then train my family to never use key words Siri indexes on like “lights”, and accept that voice commands to control sets of lights all need to be turned into scenes
- Set an automations on every LED bar to control the load instead, so that if an LED bar happens to catch a voice command, it “forwards” it to the load. This workaround only gets me on/off, not dim level (due to apple limitations)
- File a bug report with apple
Fixes available to Apple:
- Make certain switch attributes ignorable/hideable/not addressable by Siri
- Generally improve their UI, cuz, come on
Fixes potentially available to Inovelli
- Release a switch without the LED Bar (or without an addressable LED bar). Call it an Inovelli White Series Basic or something. Seriously, I would personally swap out all the switches I bought for a model like this in a heartbeat. I have exactly 0 important use cases that involve me setting up automations that control the color and brightness of an LED bar on my wall switches. I have dozens of important use cases that having these LED bars gets in the way of “hey Siri, tun on all the kitchen lights”
- Release a firmware update that allows us to disable the LED bar endpoint. Ideally this could be a configured via a parameter to just make the LED bar light not present itself via matter. If it can’t be a parameter, I’m telling you right now I would happy manually flash all my switches to a firmware version that did this even if it meant I could never go back (for all the same reasons in 1)
- Release a firmware update that passes commands that hit the light bar through to the load. This way any stray commands that hit the LED bar get passed through to the load instead. This is maybe a happy “middle ground” that fixes my most important problems, while still cluttering up my home app with a bunch of lights I don’t need and leaves us hoping that Apple gets it’s act together on HomeKit UI at some point.
I can’t stress this enough. Inovelli is a really cool company that is the high-quality do it all version of next gen home automation. There’s obviously an incredible fan base of power users here that DO appreciate all the extra features. Inovelli also figured out how to do some cool things within the matter spec to enable that light bar.
That power user enablement is a complexity that comes at a cost, though. I have been a power user in my life. I don’t want to be any more. Everything about these white series switches works great (for me) except for the fact that it has these worse than useless (for me) LED bars cluttering up my home UI, making me do gymnastics with naming, making voice commands for key use cases useless, annoying my family, and getting in the way of the whole experience… I’ve gone from excitedly installing the switches to just letting the second half of them sit in the boxes.
Put yourselves in the shoes of someone who wants an Apple HomeKit experience that “just works”. Someone who might never think to ever control the light bar with an automation, and even if taught that they could would have a hard time coming up with a use case for it. Someone who reads about homeassistant and raspberry pi and just gets hungry (and not excited to figure out exactly what needs to be ordered to enable everything). This person wants to wire up a switch, scan a bar code, and then be able to control that switch with their phone and their voice. The white series without the addressable LED bars is the PERFECT switch for this person. The build quality is great. Reliability has been superb. Response time is fantastic. I have no doubt that the white series without the addressable LED bar would become the easiest to use, best reviewed smart switch in the market for your every day user who is willing to do light electrical work. It’s literally everything I could ask for in a switch.
In short. I am an unashamed ex-power user that uses Apple because it “just works”. The benefit of that simplicity very often comes at a cost of extra features. We can hope, and file bug reports with apple to try to get them to fix how it deals with this Inovelli switch (and I have/will). To Inovelli: you could also make this “just work” with a trade off. A white series switch without an addressable LED bar (however we get there) would be the perfect switch for me. if there’s any way you can make that happen, please let me know how I can help.
I appreciate all the work you did, and the invention and spirit that went into this fantastic product. It’s not perfect for me, because of how I want to use it, but it is fantastic. Thanks for listening.