Thank you. I appreciate the effort that has gone into figuring out naming conventions that work around the status bar.
This does fix addressing single lights, as long as you’re willing to avoid certain key words like “lights”. It does not address handling rooms or zones full of lights.
None of this naming chicanery would be necessary if the firmware would simply allow us to set up the LED bar as non-addressable. My key complaint is not that you can’t work around it and make it passable. My key complaint is that you have to work around it, and without the LED bar it could be actually good instead of just passable.
Exactly I don’t want to run a HA and import into HomeKit. I would love an option to just disable the notification bar as Matter light directly in the White Switch
I haven’t been able to find time to reply properly, but I did want to acknowledge that I see you responded.
I also just read CroVlado’s reply with their workaround, which seems to be different from what I’m doing. I’m glad to see another naming convention strategy working for others. The two of us are in agreement with Siri being dumb and the workaround revolving around how you name your accessories, which again, is not specific to these White Series. As a shared earlier, this experience isn’t unique to these White Series and we’ve always had to strategically think through our naming logic/conventions the moment we have a second “light” accessory in the same room (or zone).
Btw, is there audio in that video you shared? If so, I can’t hear the voice prompts or Siri replies. Honestly, video is a hell of a lot easier to work with, so if you don’t mind recording another one with the mic on, that would be much easier than stepping through photos (my original intent).
Addressing an entire room, I’d suggest scenes. Tell Siri to set living room scene vs turn on living room lights. This is an apple issue; not allowing you to set what Siri reacts to and how it reacts and what devices you just want not addressed at all. Asking a company such as inovelli to handicap their products due to apple’s poor support for home isn’t the solution here.
If the scene doesn’t work as you may have hoped and it still turns the switch led bars on, you may consider and automation to piggyback when that scene turns on, wait a few seconds and turn the led bars off.
Just spitballing here as I don’t know you exact scenarios, but nonetheless this is just apple doing “safe” apple things
Scenes don’t address the missing totality of the missing functionality. Scenes in Home have pre-set dim levels, so I’d have to set up multiple scenes with lots of preset dim levels just to get functionality that I could otherwise have out of the box. “Set the bathroom lights to (arbitrary number)”
Agree to disagree. Apple implemented in line with intent of the spec (which has no concept of a status light). Asking a company such as Apple to anticipate and engineer around a Inovelli using the spec in novel and unanticipated ways isn’t the solution here.
In seriousness, you and I value different things. And it’s not Inovelli’s fault that no one has put out a basic matter over thread switch that doesn’t have all the extra status bar functionality that I don’t value. It is perfectly reasonable for me to say to Inovelli: “I don’t value the status bar. It gets in the way of my experience. It has cost me hours and hours of tinkering and resulted in an experience with your product that was not in line with my expectations. I think you can make me AND your power users happy by updating your firmware to allow people to disable the advanced functionality.” Obviously Inovelli can do whatever it wants with my feedback. But for me as a customer, it’s perfectly reasonable to want a more basic option that just works in line with standard uses of the spec. I’m not a firmware developer, but it also seems within reason in terms of being able to implement. As a customer, I will almost certainly NOT be purchasing their switches or fan controls if they all come with this amount of overhead and headache for setup in Apple Home.
This is probably what I’m going to resort to, after I finish renaming and installing everything. Fortunately in home, you can have the turn on event trigger a scene that turns it back off.
This is unique to white series switches because they all come with the second addressable light which is not actually a light. With previous HomeKit switches, they all responded as expected as soon as I worked out a reasonable name with my family.
With White Series, I have to go through five minutes of naming extra HomeKit setup and scene/automation reconfiguration every time I add a switch just so that I don’t have bright white LEDs glowing at me every time I try to control more than one device at a time.
I will redo a video, including audio, with the problems and how to implement the workaround. I’ve had limited time to do the extra editing to make that work, but I’ll try to get it done in the next few days.
The issue isn’t them putting out a basic switch, it’s the fact that you can’t disable endpoints in Apple home. This IS an Apple problem. The switch is 100% matter compliant. Apple is behind on matter implementation. 1.3 is just getting partial introduction in 18.1 with vacuums still coming later in the year. Apple is terrible at dragging its feet on HomeKit. The platform can be so powerful and it’s fantastic for not relying on cloud connections to still work but in the end if they won’t implement the ability to ignore endpoints there’s no fault to inovelli for that. Inovelli can’t turn the features off because the hub decides how switch operates and functions it can assign to it. The light bar just says hey I’m an endpoint and I am a rgb light. So the hub registers that.
For example with non-matter switches, you could dictate what the entities shows up as, (light, fan, or switch); with matter it is part of the end point registration, it registers as a light and that’s that.
As much as I understand your situation you bought the switch with all the advanced features advertised.
So now we’re stuck with an early matter limitation and Apple’s milk-toast feature abilities.
While inovelli could release a firmware to completely disable endpoints (probably), there is no way that I know of to push it only to some users as the matter hub is what looks for updates and applies it to devices on its network, so there’s no way to do 2 separate firmware for people that want limited functionality of the switch.
Let’s take Apple out of the equation for a moment. Because the switch has an extra “light” attached to it that controls the status bar, you as a user have to deal with that extra light in any platform you pair it to. You have to name it, set it up, move it to a room, disable it, whatever. Apple’s implementation may be particularly bad, but it doesn’t change the fact that Inovelli’s advanced functionality comes at a setup cost on every single platform.
You may value that at a user, I’m simply providing the feedback that I don’t, and I think there’s a way to satisfy both of us
Inovelli pushed the spec by having an extra “light” that should be a “status light” before the concept of a status light was available in the spec. A better design and solution would be to have the status bar hidden by default and set up a firmware parameter to enable it. Yeah, we’re stuck with what Apple’s done. We’re also “stuck” with Inovelli’s design decisions.
I understand I bought with risk. I’m trying to provide feedback and an ask for something better that doesn’t take away from the uses that do value the extra options.
I realize I’m an early adopter. Inovelli could potentially do three things:
Hear the demand and release a basic version of the switch that runs on separate firmware (doesn’t help me unless I swap them)
Update the firmware to disable the endpoint as a parameter (may or may not be technically feasible)
Update the firmware to pass commands that hit the status bar through to the load (may or may not be technically feasible, and only a partial fix)
I’m not looking to take away anyone else’s advanced functionality. I’m tying to communicate that I, personally, would like something better. The feature, as it exists today in the ecosystem I’m using, sucks. Ignoring the status bar still gets in the way of basic functionality and it doesn’t even really work as intended because it catches stray commands addressed to rooms/zones. I would argue that for most users in every ecosystem, it isn’t great - it requires a bunch of setup every time you add a switch for what is in reality an edge case for most users. This same switch, with the status bar hidden by default behind a parameter, would be GREAT. Almost perfect. It’d be an improvement in every ecosystem and take nothing away from power users that want to fiddle with it (other than setting one more parameter that they’re probably already doing anyway).
I realize people are passionate that Apple’s support sucks. I don’t disagree. But Inovelli does have the ability to deliver a better product here regardless of what Apple does. It’s easy and lazy to blame Apple, but it doesn’t get us anything better.
I’m genuinely curious what even brought you to inovelli?
Both the red and blue switches have been extremely feature rich and this white switch is basically a direct copy of the blue and slightly dumbed down to meet the matter specs. Just about all of this was discussed while the project was ongoing and before the switches released.
The main selling point of this switch is its versatility compared to all the basic switches on the market.
These switches are quite literally the best on the market currently.
Alarm system not armed after a certain time? Doors left open/unlocked? Washer/dryer/ dish washer has completed its cycle? Working from home and starting a business meeting and cannot be interrupted?
Have switches notify you around the entire house.
Based on what I’m reading tho your biggest complaint is the “modern” voice assistants. Which quite frankly are utter trash on all platforms not just Apple.
“Hey siri, close shop door” (with perfect read-back of my voice prompt)
—“who do you want to call?”
Or one of my favorites from Linus (LTT)
“Hey google, call Ivonne Ho”
— “I can’t find that in your contacts”
I have an Aqara hub that has a light on it. If I were to tell Siri to turn the “room” lights on, that hubs light ring will come on.
This is not a problem unique to inovelli.
So the TL;DR of all this is, if you wanted simple switches, why didn’t you go with industry leaders of light switches such as Lutron or Leviton? They do exactly what you want, be a light switch.
Came to say I’m facing the same problem. I didn’t know the White Series even had the LED bar when I purchased it and I don’t need it. It’s kinda cool and I might find a use for it someday. My interest in Inovelli was in having core Thread and Matter for future options.
It IS frustrating that the feature’s existence impedes the switch’s primary job I hired it for, which is being a switch I can control with HomeKit and Siri. Let’s hope some of that AI foo will make this all better. I’m not hopeful.
Considering Inovelli was able to support something like 7 gazillion config params, I’d think adding a led_bar_just_dont should be possible.
Inovelli is the only matter over thread switch. It also features rock solid reliability perfect response time so far. I also get to support a small company.
I tried Leviton WiFi switches. They did exactly what I wanted, but were constantly dropping connectivity. I have no confidence that their matter over WiFi connectivity will be any better.
Lutron Caseta switches require a hub, use proprietary connectivity, and are ugly as sin.
Inovelli are matter over thread, rock solid reliability and build, “don’t require a hub”, and are multi-platform such that they should be future proof for me. Without the notification bar, they’d be perfect. In other words, the versatility was not a selling point for me at all, I thought it’d be a nice to have on top of having a working matter over thread switch. Turns out that versatility gets in the way of it working as just a switch.
My disappointment comes from the fact that the extra functionality ultimately does require a hub to disable it and make it work as expected. Of course we can blame Apple, and I do. I also think there’s a market for Inovelli to be doing something different.
I have Leviton and Lutron which I’m replacing with Inovelli.
Lutron Caseta Diva and Claro switches are fantastic and are far from ugly. The original button switches were not to everyone’s taste (mine included) as it’s easier for a lot of people to feel the paddles and gives more tactile confirmation of click. Lutron may be proprietary in the switch communication but it’s as solid as it gets. It’s been voted the best in the smart home as they can be relied upon always.
Leviton is solid as well. People with inconsistent WiFi complain about WiFi switches. Most people have garbage WiFi coverage at home, and the ones that claim they have good coverage do it with mesh systems which are terrible with mDNS relaying. Gen1 Leviton switches struggled with this because as soon as a network lost mDNS back to Apple HomeKit they would become unresponsive which required the routers to be rebooted. Experienced this myself when I had a mesh network. Upgraded network gear and haven’t had a single drop since. I have a second gen switch of theirs that’s matter over WiFi and it doesn’t have any issues either. This is not unique to Leviton and will happen to all HomeKit accessories that rely on mDNS which is pretty much all of them that are before matter and thread.
Your understanding of matter over thread is a bit skewed. You absolutely still need a hub, it’s just not a proprietary hub, so until your hub of choosing decides to adopt matter features that inovelli has already adopted, your only real options are to wait for your hub to adopt them, become a bit of a power user and work around it, or just move to a different platform.
You see how slowly Lutron and Leviton release devices, you think a company that’s probably less than half their size can just up and adopt switches without light bars and just push them to market to appease a few? Do you make these kinds of demands from Lutron and Leviton? What about Apple? Have you gone and bothered their design and feedback group demanding they get on with their matter implementation and making HomeKit better? Do you even have any kind of scope of the EXTENSIVE process that is in manufacturing?
If you have a computer at home that’s always on, it’s easy to run home assistant and export these switches back to Apple home as just switches and disable the light bar that way. It’s possible because home assistant is a platform that CAN while Apple HomeKit CAN’T
These switches are inovelli’s bread and butter. They have released them across three different communications platforms and they are all the same for the most part. Anyone that says “I don’t know it would do this and have that” did poor research and can only blame themselves.
It boils my blood when people want to demand something from the little guy while letting mega corps do poor work and accepting it for what it is.
If you don’t want the LED bar, just pop the front off of the switch and cover it from inside with some white electrical tape…
Im convinced that this would still bother them as they would see the “light” end point on in the home app. Also people still struggle with the naming conventions for the switch because Siri is an absolute muppet and turns the led bar on instead of the load the switch is controlling.
My household two White Series switches on the way, recommended by me after looking into switches and finding them to be the best option. I’m now very nervous about the idea after reading this discussion. I agree with the quoted part completely, a big portion of the reason I got these is because every place I had read prior to this thread was glowing praise, especially about the ease of using them with HomeKit. How involved the company seems to be with its customers was a bonus as well.
I wanted these switches because they were Thread, they seemed to pair with HomeKit extremely easily, and they didn’t require a complex setup to work with multi way switches… The possibility of being able to tinker with them (LED strip, shortcut button) seemed like it could be fun at some point, but wasn’t a major concern of mine. I too wish there was just a way to either buy one with no LED strip at all or disable it in the firmware if it’s going to be this much of a pain.
I think this isn’t fully Inovelli’s fault, it’s partially on the reviewers on YouTube for not pointing out the shortcomings… And I should have expected that comments on smart home subreddits, etc would be more quick to want to use external solutions like HomeAssistant.
I really just want a smart switch that’s Matter over Thread, works well with HomeKit, and… I guess… doesn’t mangle the Matter standard…? It appears I’m not going to get that any time soon without learning how to get HomeAssistant set up… Is there even any kind of support for LED status lights on the horizon for Matter? Nothing I’ve read has mentioned it for 1.2/1.3.
If this stuff gets sorted out I’ll probably replace most of our light switches with these. We use a mix of dumb bulbs and smart bulbs, and while it seems like there isn’t really a good way to do dimmer control with Phillips Hue, its not that big of a deal to me.
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Edit 10/15/24: I just bit the bullet and set up HomeAssistant. It’s not that bad, but I really hope there is a “native” solution for this later on.
Reading through this thread, because I came across the LED Indicator in Apple Home and was sure there was a way to work around this. I am very surprised to find out that I am not the only one having this issue and that there’s no workaround available native to Apple Home.
@Eric_Inovelli I thought your input early in this thread was really valuable. It seems a lot of folks, myself included, would like to exclude the LED Indicator from being brought into Apple Home. Is the team aware of this and do you believe this functionality will be added in a future firmware update?