You and I are cut from the same cloth my friend lol. I was just messaging Maycock this!
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A newbie to this, my take on waiting for the new switches was simple(r)? that zigbee seems to work well with Eero pro as the hub and I can eventually remove my smartthings hub and just use one device/hub for wifi and home automation.
(Although I have started to wonder how long I can wait for these switches as I have started to feel the lack of automation around the new house).
Some details/background:
After i moved to a new house, I had a couple of leftover zwave switches/sensors which are either not able to connect to samsung smartthings or get disconnected too often (Including a never used Inovelli zwave on-off switch that I had from a year back).
I assume its the longer distance because of the larger house and the fact that in the old house i had almost all my switches to zwave and they would help by creating a mesh?
So I bought a new enbrighten zigbee switch to just try it out and it worked well.
Considering the above as well as the renewed push on zigbee and Innovelli taking it up, I thought it best to wait for the blue series.
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Thank you for the various perspectives on this. In general, the inovelli z-wave dimmer has worked great for me, but i have had issues with several other z-wave devices ā mostly battery powered. For example i used to use z-wave door/window sensors but they have always been finicky and not very reliable. I switched them to zigbee sensors and have never one time had an issue. That makes me think that zigbee may be the better protocal/solution. But hard to know, since the z-wave inovelli dimmers have been fine.
There are many unknowns with respect to matter/thread. I want to believe it is the future and that with my homepods it will be faster response times. But thatās all speculation. I assume that even the fine developers at inovelli donāt know exactly how it will pan out, but they are making a calculated and strategic bet on the zigbee chip being able to have the flexibility to update via software.
One other thing i will admit worries me a bit is the newness of the switch. Sure itās exciting and new, but that also means that there will be bugs and potential unforeseen issues that crop up. That could lead to a rockier experience to start with over the red switch that has been battle tested for years already.
I saw the timeline was targeting February for release of the devices. Is that still realistic? If so, I might as well wait to try one out. Will there be a way to pre-order so that I can get one as soon as it is ready?
@kendrosg Iām sorry youāve had so much trouble with HASS. It was a fairly steep learning curve for me to get started with it, but itās worked pretty well. One thing i wish it did (maybe it does?) is allow me to configure my switches in bulk. As it is, I have to go through each device one by one to set all the parameters. That gets tedious when you have a dozen switches. And Iāve had a few that got reset for whatever reason and it would be nice to be able to clone the config from another switch or edit the params of multiple switches at once. I know this isnāt a home assistant forum, but i figured iād share my experience as well. I personally enjoy tinkering with my home automation setup. But if you donāt, have you tried the Lutron Caseta system? It seems more like a set it and forget it system.
+1 to know the answer to those 2 questionsā¦ 
February is the target for Zigbee certificationā¦
Yeah this would be my guess ā depending on how far away from the hub the device is, it may cause some issues. Z-Wave does work in a mesh, so likely, yes, you had a solid mesh
I can try some troubleshooting with you offline if youād like?
Lol, this is spot on my friend ā hereās to hoping it pays off!
Yes, this is definitely a valid concern and one that Iām afraid of myself. The Red Series has been proven over 2.5 years at this point and the firmware is stable.
The good news is that ZigBee also does offer OTA updates and weāre working with Hubitat, ST and Home Assistant in our beta program to ensure these OTA processes work properly. So, even if we donāt catch everything in beta, we should be able to quickly remedy the situation once itās public. The other good news is that we have quite the history in the forums here to watch out for and test during beta.
Iāll know more tomorrow (Thurs) during our 1v1 with the manufacturer, but as far as I know, weāre still good. Being conservative, I would say end of March at the latest. What it came down to for me was seeing how good the firmware developer was as I put quite a bit of time in there for firmware development and Iām happy to report that they exceeded my expectations.
The one roadblock Iām seeing right now is the Philips Hue integration ā they arenāt accepting, āFriends of Hueā partners right now, so itās making things difficult to really integrate in their system properly. More to come here. It isnāt a dealbreaker if we canāt get in their system right away, but it would be disheartening.
EDIT: I meant to answer regarding pre-orders. Weāre going to play it conservative this time (5-Button switch fiasco really scarred us) and wait until beta testing is completed and all the features are confirmed before making a decision to open up pre-orders.
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Thank you Eric, you are generous as always.
I suspect itās just the distance (Switch is upstairs and smart things Hub is downstairs, I wish It could connect to Eero pro though which has multiple access points).
Over the weekend, I plan to try it downstairs closer to the hub to see if its the switch by any chance or was just the distance. Will update when I do.
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Iām sorry youāve had so much trouble with HASS. It was a fairly steep learning curve for me to get started with it, but itās worked pretty well. One thing i wish it did (maybe it does?) is allow me to configure my switches in bulk. As it is, I have to go through each device one by one to set all the parameters. That gets tedious when you have a dozen switches. And Iāve had a few that got reset for whatever reason and it would be nice to be able to clone the config from another switch or edit the params of multiple switches at once. I know this isnāt a home assistant forum, but i figured iād share my experience as well. I personally enjoy tinkering with my home automation setup. But if you donāt, have you tried the Lutron Caseta system? It seems more like a set it and forget it system.
Definitely. Iām actually running a couple Lutron hubs (a caseta pro and an RA2 select). I definitely like to tinker - but what I never wanted was to have to maintain.
What I mean, is when the mood hits me I actually enjoy cracking open nodeRed and writing automations in js (while Iām on the topic, yaml is another thing that always irked me about HA - I always hated the syntax). But what I want is that once Iām done messing with the system - I just want it to chug along for months on end without me needing to touch it if I donāt want to. But at the same time - I donāt want to have to ignore software updates to achieve that reliability.
Thatās kind of the position of found myself in with home assistant. After having small point updates break things, I became weary of updating out of habit. But then at the same time, itās makes me uneasy to leave software unpatched because Iām too busy to crack open the change log and ensure there are no breaking changes.
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Any chance the new notifications will make their way into a future firmware upgrade on the Red Dimmers?
Likely not ā thereās not much we can do with the existing Red Series line as weāve maxed out the memory on the chips 
Project Update: Timeline changed a bit in that weāre looking at a definite March launch now hearing feedback from UL that theyāre backed up due to COVID. Conservative estimate will be mid-end of March.
From a firmware side of things, we should be expecting Rd. 2 of firmware the week prior to Chinese New Year (end of Jan / beginning of Feb). They are working on a LoRa project for us that has tied up some of their resources, so once they get that product out, they can resume work on the ZigBee version.
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Is this a yet to be announced new product? 
Edit: Found my own answer
Perhaps some existing uncommonly used items could be sacrificed? Does anyone actually use the physical switch to program settings? Just a thought 
IRRC the earlier versions of the firmware allowed you to change all (or almost all) the parameters via config buttons. In order to gain space for some needed new features like Smart Bulb mode, they removed physical button config options for many of the uncommonly used items. They still kept the important ones so electrical contractors could get them working without pairing to a hub. This is things like Neutral/Non-Neutral, Single-pole/3-way, Min/Max levels, etc.
Well crap. Wasnāt aware previous efforts were already made on this front. Canāt think of anything else to lighten the existing load so to say. Really would love those extra notifications. Canāt justify adding any Zigbee devices to an all Zwave environment at this point as the performance would likely be poor with only a few devices. Will have to hold out for the 800 series Red switches in 20203 I suppose.
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I hope we donāt have to wait that long. Iāll be long 
Clarification? Does this mean AUX switches wired to the dimmer will be capable of multitap scenes? (ie pressing 3X UP on the AUX switch is the same as pressing on the dimmer)
The Red series dimmers currently do not support this AFAIK.
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For the Blue Series, Yes
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Do you know if this is currently possible on the Red series dimmers?
@wogfun - No. it will not be a function on Red series.