Ah well, thanks for the clarification.
It’s still going to be an awesome switch!
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Order is in for a contractor pack. Very excited for these switches! I have Red Series (30 & 31 SN) throughout our house and plan to replace several with the blue and the rest will go in places not yet automated. Wondering (that’s hoping, actually) if it will be possible In the near future to upgrade the LED firmware in the Red dimmers so they will be able to access the 7 LEDs in the bar separately like Blues can?
Got the order in for my 10pack. Not sure yet how many aux I’ll need. This house has a crazy number of lights and switches. So glad I stumbled on the community. Had resigned my self to zwave switches and figured I’d at least get GOOD ones from y’all. Excited to see how these work and what comes next!
Any chance of selling your strip lights with either zwave or ZigBee control box? I need at least 32ft and want to keep at least lighting on ZigBee.
It’s extremely unlikely without a hardware update, as the current Red switches have maxed out the available space.
I’ve done battery powered tech for a living. You probably can’t get persistent lights or even any kind of prompt notification animation if you want to keep the device slim enough to stick on the wall. Keeping the radio awake to receive the notification signal costs too much.
You could imagine a several segment LED to match the look of the others, that could be used for immediate feedback from actions, but I’m not sure it’s worth the added components and power draw.
If you DO want to go for broke and do something nobody else does, you could imagine an LED notification system that pulsed once a minute or so. You’d need to cover the rear of the device in coin cell batteries to do that (CR2450 would be a good choice, with a wall-plate cover size switch you could probably get 8 in there) but you’d still get complaints of short battery life from people who were zinging the LED fantastic all day and all night. Might possibly be able to get 6 months to a year out.
It certainly would be a market differentiator!
But for my money, give us the same configurability and clean control we have from the switches. All I want is a decora-style up/down with tap, release, and hold. Maybe two paddles side by side, and maybe a scene controller with a grid of buttons.
If you skipped the hardwired scene controller and just did a battery powered one that could fit into a decora slot over a wall plate, I think you’d solve most people’s needs with a much less expensive device to develop. Check out that Legrand device for what that can look like.
I’ve only been working with the Legrand Radiant dumb line, but honestly they have had something that fit in every situation I’ve wanted. A and C built-in, night light with swappable louvre cover, GFCI with A. Anything I’ve seen is generally one outlet only and I think it’s related to NEC but also that it may have changed in recent years.
Most people probably don’t see a need for USB smarts, but I have one use case in particular I would love to have it. Not even the Zooz plug has switching on the USB. I have a couple of cat water fountains that use USB to power their motors. One of them came with an accessory I had never considered: a PIR sensor to turn on the fountain when something is there. It still piggybacks on the USB cable, but it got me thinking about other ways USB automation could be handy.
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I’d love a do-all USB + power plug outlet, but I’m probably not your target market for it. I don’t actually need smart plugs (I have smart bulbs), but I’d absolutely be in heaven for a really good fully featured USB-C PD plug. I don’t think all the bells and whistles are physically possible though, so…
In a realistic world, I’d replace half a dozen US wall plugs with an outlet containing a single NEMA 5-15 or 5-20 on the bottom, and on the top I’d like a USB A 5.2v 2.4A socket paired with a USB-C PD capable of at least 20V @ 1.5A, as well as the usual intermediate voltages on down. Unfortunately, these requirements guarantee that you’d need to be using a very modern GaN chipset and likely a manufacturer specialized in miniaturization and power budget, which adds a lot to the cost.
The thinking here is that this is enough power for a guest to overnight charge a laptop if they aren’t using it, and for guests to quick charge their phones if they’re visiting for a party or a dinner. Enough devices still need a USB-A that I can’t quite suggest leaving it off in favor it dual USB-C, and users aren’t great at reading little labels that say “don’t plug in here if you want to charge fast.”
Obviously higher power outlets are better, I think the sell would be easier at 45W laptop charging, but you have to balance the backbox depth and heat sinking. I’m not sure it’s a commercially viable product though, I think you’d be pushing your luck at around $50 per to consumers.
If you could get an upper-tier hospitality partner interested, I suspect something like this could sell like hotcakes, since it would really improve guest experience friction with chargers falling out of the wall and adapters and weird outlets on lamps and so on. There might be space in that market for a double-wide option, which could make the solution massively technically easier. I doubt you’d get much consumer traction with that though.
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I doubt you’ll see a product update to do that, a decent zigbee alternative is the gledopto control boxes. It’s a fairly crowded market so I don’t see Inovelli benefiting from joining the fray.
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Just had to order 3. Running out of switches to replace in this townhouse of mine. But also figured it was a good way to have some wired Zigbee devices.
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Wanted to give an update on the, “Instant On” with bindings. We had a breakthrough that I’m hoping works for everyone.
@terrence.bentley and @red930 – what we uncovered in the firmware of the switch I was testing was that the engineer still put a 500ms delay in there regardless of if we changed the paddle delay to 0. This was a miscommunication in that they were confused because we also asked for them to allow local configuration from the switch (which includes multi-tapping).
In their head, if we disabled the delay time to 0, it would be impossible to configure the switch locally via multi-taps, so they still put in a delay (whoops).
Once we uncovered that, we asked them to remove it regardless and the results are hopefully much different than what you saw above. I’ll admit, it’s hard for me to tell that much of a difference (as I thought the 500ms was fast) but I can tell a difference.
Curious what you think?
I can do a more in depth one later, but wanted to at least get this out.
The setup is the following:
- Left Switch = Inovelli 2-1
- Right Switch = Inovelli Add-On/Aux
- Light = Juno Zigbee connected light
I bound the 2-1 to the Juno light and set the switch to Smart Bulb Mode (switch is in On/Off mode) neutral with aux.
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Just got caught up from the flurry of activity. Place my order for 2 contractor packs and 4 Aux switches.
This is my first foray into Zigbee. For those of you using Home Assistant, what dongle are you using? I have a Home Assistant Yellow ordered, it has a built in Zigbee radio, but I won’t get that until Novermber/December, so was thinking I should get this set up sooner with a dongle. I’m running HA on a Pi4 currently.
I have the Sonoff USB dongle. I believe a few other have the nortek zwave/zigbee combo stick (HUSBZB-1).
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I’ve got the Conbee II running with ZHA currently.
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This. No issues/fast, but no 700 series z-wave (or the nightmares).
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Wow. Very cool… Didn’t realize device-based room level presence detection was even a thing. I was mainly going to base my lighting auto-off automation on the aqara PIR ‘presence’ sensors which work fairly well for me… but “presence” is really just last motion +10 mins.
Could certainly fail if the kid was sitting on the bed reading a book (ha!) - ok sitting on the bed doom scrolling tik toks!!
Not sure I’d put a BLE detection device in kids rooms through their phones are essentially glued to their hands except when charging these days so that could work effectively.
Then there’s this new Aqara FP1 sensor which seems to be the next Gen tech in presence detection using mm wave 'radar. ’ Seems that this would be the shangri-la of room presence.
Last post is new video from Everything Smart Home with his review of the FP1.
I usually don’t ask questions where the answer(s) / information I get back will be irrelevant to decisions I’m making.
More importantly, I’m not certain why I am wondering about how this 2022 switch decision may impact a home sale in 8-12 years considering we won’t move into our new home until July!
But I’ll float this anyway…
Are the core features of the Blues on device? Will they work without a hub? On / off and dim level?
Just thinking would these switches need to be pulled down the road in advance of a sale if future buyers didn’t want them to be smart / connected? That was the nice thing about Insteon… Worked pretty well on their own (even if virtually paired with another switch across the house) if you didn’t need remote control or automations.
As noted, I’m going this route anyway (!!) , but thought I’d ask.
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Yes, no hub needed for basic feature sets. Some configuration on switch is needed via config button (3 way, on/off or dimmer mode etc).
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That new video after removing the 500ms hardware delay looks really, really fast. I would be hard pressed to tell the difference between that and my Pico setup.
For marketing purposes I would classify that as “near instant” :P.
Also, the Aux performance seems fantastic, how does that work exactly? Is it an electrical signal through the traveller or is it Zigbee to the other switch?
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Trade secret…jk. Probably looks for pulse width on terminal. Aux is completely smartless. No radios at all.