Zigbee 2-1 Switch (On/Off & Dimmer) | Project New Horizon (Blue Series)

Ha, yes, this current product I’m referencing is actually for a B2B customer that came to us to design this switch for them. We wanted to see how it would work out first before considering it for our own lineup. So, right now it’s still strictly for B2B, but it could potentially be released to the public. However, there’s not a lot of commercial hubs that speak LoRa right now, so I’m not sure what the market potential would be.

Yeah this is a good point. It may not seem like it based on feedback from this forum, but there are actually a lot of installers who use Alarm.com or Ring and there’s no way to change parameters, so we have to leave these features on there.

As @mamber mentioned, we did strip a lot of it out prior to make room for some of the other features and tweaks and we’re still left with a maxed out memory unfortunately.

Ha, yes, I think we’ve pretty much explored all options for the 500 Series. There’s still some enhancements we need to make like overriding the 80% throttle in a 3-Way setting that we’re trying to figure out right now, but as far as adding in more features, it’s going to be really hard to do.

The other kind of, “unspoken” problem is that the current manufacturer doesn’t have the bandwidth to continuously make these tweaks for us and every time we do, we have to pay them, so we have to go to them with a lot of enhancements at once to make it worth while.

20203 is a very long ways away lol

Yes, that is what we asked for with the Blue Series (multi-tap on the aux switch will be detected on the smart switch). Currently, this is not a feature on the Red Series nor will it unfortunately ever be until possibly the 800 Series as there isn’t enough room and the engineers who worked on the 500 Series said the hardware just doesn’t support it (we’re using a different manufacturer for this product than the Red Series product).

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Stories like this are exactly why I won’t jump to Home Assistant.

However, I’m using Hubitat and it has worked just fine for me. I’ve thought about using HASS with Hubitat as the Z-wave controller, integrated with it. I’ve read some positive results from that route. Did you do this or is your Hubitat completely isolated from HASS?

You could use zwavejsmqtt. I just use it as a HA integration and have been super happy (coming from OpenHAB) but if you’re still leery of that, you can just go through mqtt rather than directly integrating.

Have you considered releasing multiple different firmware versions? For example, firmware version A has the physical button for installer setup/etc., and firmware version B is configurable only using Z-Wave and has a few extra features?

I’m not even running HASS at all anymore. When the VM crashed, I just decided to bite the bullet and rebuild everything I was dependent on it for in Hubitat or HomeKit.

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Nice to see the progress on the zigbee switches. Did you guys ever figure out if there was something similar to zwave associations for zigbee? If there is and I can get instant response if my hue bulbs, would likely replace my zwave switches in smart bulb mode (the ones connected to smart bulbs) with these switches. Especially since I have red on - off switches connected to my smart bulb and the configurable delays for that has been delayed for a while and it’s not clear if it’s coming (Latest firmware for LZW30-SN? - #16 by EricM_Inovelli)

Also, I know @Eric_Inovelli said no luck so far with friends of hue but if eventually added to hue, does that, mean instant response (similar to how the hue dimmer remotes are)?

Great question. Yes, ZigBee’s equivalent to Z-Wave Associations is called ZigBee Binding using Touchlink technology (sorry to all the tech guys if I butchered this). We’re still working on a direct integration with the Hue gateway, but in theory it seems possible.

This is actually a hot topic and was discussed last night for a while amongst the beta testers.

@dmcc was able to successfully bind the switch to Hue bulbs via zigbee2mqtt via Home Assistant. There are still a few bugs that need to be ironed out, but the good news is it’s possible.

What we’re currently investigating right now is how to do it outside of HA and only using the Hue bridge (or via no bridge at all).

There is an article that suggests this should be possible here: How To Install A Philips Hue Dimmer Switch | Philips Hue

Without a Hue Bridge: If you have Philips Hue lights that aren’t connected to a Bridge, hold the Dimmer switch up to the light you want to control (try to stay within about six inches of the bulb or fixture). Press and hold the “ON” button for 3 seconds until the green light starts to blink. You can now control this light using the Dimmer switch. Repeat for up to 10 bulbs. To remove a light from the Dimmer switch, repeat the same process, but hold the “OFF” button for 10 seconds

These are the three options we’re currently exploring and should have more information within the next week or two as the firmware engineer is now restarting on the ZigBee firmware:

  1. The Inovelli device joins the Philips Hue network and you can use the “touchlink” binding to connect bulbs directly to the Inovelli switch as mentioned in the link above.
  2. The Inovelli device acts as its own controller and you can connect bulbs to it directly.
  3. You use the Inovelli switch on a different hub (like zigbee2mqtt, zha, etc) and you can use software to create the bindings or use the physical method mentioned above.

Do you mean if you turn on/off the switch, will it instantly report to the Hue Bridge?

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Nice!!! Thanks for this. Looking forward to seeing the results. Would be interesting to see if binding would be possible on Hubitat. I don’t think pairing on hue bridge and then adding to hubitat would expose all the central scene features but might be wrong. Priority for me would definitely be fast response of the bulbs though.

I mean would there be instant response of the bulbs? With the hue dimmer switches, the bulbs respond instantly. Not sure how hue implemented it but my guess would be that it uses touchlink binding like you mentioned above.

@Eric_Inovelli When I think ZigBee I think Control4. Is there any thought going into licensing Control4 within a sub-set of the Blue Series, similar to Sinope products? Control4 dimmers are very expensive and I don’t think the quality is there, personally. A Control4 dimmer as higher cost, but lower than manufacturer price would be intriguing.

The cheaper Control4 line of dimmers are rebadged Jasco with the C4 firmware and ZigBee profile installed. They’re still double the price of Jascos of course.

(We have Control4 here at the house)

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Quick Update: We should be receiving the updated firmware on January 20th that addresses a lot (if not all) of the issues/bugs we have tracked in GitHub. The team is still working on a solution for Philips Hue and hopefully can pull it off with this next round of firmware.

On a side note, we also just kicked off work on the Blue Series Hype video which is my favorite part of what I do (marketing). The team that is working on this is the same team that has done all of our videos and is an awesome local company: Overneath (check them out!).

Here’s a very, very rough draft of the video. I hesitated to share it bc there’s a lot of placeholders, but I thought it would be fun to share the progress of the video as it finalizes and if there’s feedback along the way, I’m always open!

V1 - Hype Video (Blue Series): f.io/zBRm-Lp9


Yes, likely not (regarding central scene) – But we will certainly test this and take a video shortly. I have a C7 and Hue bridge at my house that I’ve been meaning to tinker with.

@BertABCD1234 – I know you have some background with Hue and Hubitat – what are your thoughts here regarding the speed? I’m not sure if you’ve tested this yet, but figured I’d ask lol.

I would think, in theory, they should work fairly quickly. But I’m not sure if you can bind the switch (if paired to Hubitat) and the bulb (if paired to Hue) leaving the only way to bind being they’re both on the same platform (and we haven’t gotten the switch to pair to Hue yet). So, the only way would be scene control, which would exhibit a slight delay as it has to go to Hubitat and then Hue and vice versa.

Very interesting – I will check this out. We had explored this previously with Z-Wave, but tbh I think we dropped the ball on the partnership and figuring out what that entails. We have a similar relationship with our Z-Wave switches with a different company in that they purchase our devices, but the licensing route would be interesting as well. Oftentimes people will write in and compare us to Control4 from an aesthetics (high end) perspective, but for a fraction of the price, so I think it would make sense to get back in contact with them.

Thanks for the reminder and suggestion!

Edit: Here we goooooo! Hopefully I hear back.

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That’s really cool, I liked seeing the placeholders and look forward to the comparison between now and the finished product.

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video looks cool :sunglasses:

But tell me again…why did you drop the screwless faceplates? :thinking: The video ‘vibe’ was all high-tech and modern, but for some reason, those screw faceplates looked dated and out-of-place for a 2022 new product reveal :disappointed:

Around here, a screwless faceplate is $4.57. A standard screw faceplate is $1.07. $3.50 price difference which would then get passed along to us. And that would cost me way more since if I had some with screws and some without, I’d then have to go replace all the faceplates in my house since it would really be triggering my OCD. lol

[EDIT: I’d guess Blue Series would be the same since most of this just depends on when/how the button events come into the hub, but…] I do this with Red Series all over, and — particularly after the firmware update that let you set the “delay” for multi-taps to less than the 700-ish millsecond default — it’s nearly instant. Hue to Hubitat is a LAN integration, and it’s pretty fast as long as both your Hue Bridge and Hubitat hub are running well. The biggest issue is really just how long the button events take to come in from the Red/Blue device. I found about 300 ms to work well for me on the Red Series (and am quite happy that it is configurable now!). Everything after that is most easily measured in milliseconds (not single milliseconds, but a few dozen or even a few hundred) in my setup, not enough to be noticeable. I’m sure a Hue-only device would be marginally faster since I think they just sent a group broadcast to the Hue network (usually not even involving the Bridge, though some people noticed that changing for some things a while back), but in practice, I can’t tell the difference.

So, if the Blue Series buttons events don’t have an insufferably long “delay” (stop me if you’ve heard that one before…), I assume it should work just as well. :smiley: (Not sure if Touchlink is possible, but that would be a way to eliminate the hub if that’s really a concern; I like the flexibility the hub provides in automation.)

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Great question and I agree, wish we had the screwless plates.

Basically, the initial design had the screwless faceplate that latched onto the metal switch:
image

Which, in theory we thought would work – but in the real-world, it didn’t work bc they ended up pressing into the drywall (or the gang-box). We then were presented with an alternate solution where the tabs would go on the side of the switch, but that also wouldn’t work in a multi-gang setup.

We then asked to look at the Lutron Claro faceplate and make something similar (where there’s two pieces) but that ended up adding an additional $2 to the cost (which @MRobi is right, would get passed onto the customer). Plus, we’d also likely be asked to create a 2-Gang, 3-Gang, etc version (all colors too) and so we just said screw it, go with a basic faceplate.


@BertABCD1234 – you da man, thanks for the explanation! @gbenrus25 does that make sense?

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I would not include a faceplate at all. It’s not going to match anyway. I guess if it’s sub $1 it’s worth it for consumer satisfaction sake but I wouldn’t expect one to be in any retail switch box.

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Yeah we have gone back and forth on this internally since the beginning of time lol and actually do not include them in the 10 packs to save money.

The cost of the faceplate I think is like $0.29. Crazy how adding a second piece adds an additinal $1.50 but I guess maybe bc if the added screws, idk.

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Personally I love the face plate in the single packaging. I have a number of single gang installations around the house. I also like the bare 10 packaging for so my multi gang installations. I wouldn’t change anything.

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I agree. I Like them included with the single packs and leave them out of the multi-packs. :+1:

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