just ordered a couple of the blue switches myself…now if the fan switches would come back in stock! 
An add-on question, and, i realize i will probably need to take this elsewhere.
BUT. just curious for those of you using HA in a hyper-v VM, any experience running the ZB/ZW usb dongle on some other device on your network? i have read snippets here and there which seem to imply its possible…
I will probably go ahead and order a HA Yellow, but, just wanted to consider this option.
Passthrough of USB can work but it also can be a headache. One or the reasons I started a niche side business of making network connected coordinators. Not here to market my stuff, really interested in this switch (and pre-ordered 3 the other night).
I haven’t done this, but my understanding is your best bet if you wanted to run the dongle separate would be to run Zigbee2MQTT (and/or ZwaveJS2MQTT) on a separate device and they’ll just communicate back to the HA instance the same as they would if they were on the same system.
I run Supervised on Ubuntu. No pass-through required. @chack has a good idea of just using zigbee2mqtt to communicate back to core.
I had MAJOR issues trying to get pass though working on hyper-v running on server 2012 essentials. Ended up running as vm on Oracle VBox on home PC as a temporary solution.
At my new home, I’ll run as vm on Unraid.
Does this switch work as a zigbee repeater? If so, can the repeating be disabled if needed?
Yes it is a router (repeater). I don’t think you can disable that feature.
Awesome, thank you so much! Looking forward to getting them to you
While I’m not as well versed nor have the setup like the seasoned HA veterans of this thread, I can say that I’ve had success in testing with the Nortek/GoControl HUSBZB-1.
Great question and just wanted to confirm what @harjms said in that they can operate as normal switches w/out a hub.
Nice, glad we got to the bottom of it – I’m actually super impressed honestly. My world has been turned upside down by Zigbee – Z-Wave Associations can be fast, but I think Zigbee is not only fast, but smooth, especially when it comes to grouping.
Noted on the marketing lingo lol
Backing up what @harjms said (thanks again!) – yes an electrical signal through the traveller.
Thanks for the support! Really means a lot
I’ll let the HA guys take care of your question haha – I’m not sure!
Echoing @stu1811 in that it is a repeater and unfortunately (or fortunately however you look at it) you cannot disable this.
@EricM_Inovelli and I doing some last minute verification/tests on bindings and I’m sure he’ll share his results on switch to switch, but I wanted to share this (raw – excuse my shaky camerawork and poor commentary) with everyone to show the power and versatility of Zigbee binding and some of the crazy tests we do to try to think of all scenarios.
In this example, we wanted to test binding two switches together on separate circuits, one circuit controlling a, “dumb” bulb and the other one controlling a smart bulb.
The left box is a non-neutral setup with the wiring looking like this:
The right box is a neutral setup with the wiring looking like this:
The non-neutral has the following setup:
The neutral has the following setup:
NOTE: Switch B is in Smart Bulb Mode
You can see that everything syncs properly, which is awesome!
DISCLAIMER: The 500ms delay is enabled, I forgot to disable it, so the speed may be a little slower than normal, but it’s still crazy fast and versatile.
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So how is this used in real life? It’s probably pretty rare to mix/match a dumb and smart bulb circuit, but I had a similar setup at my old house in the basement.
There was a light at the top of the stairs and then I would have to walk to the bottom of the stairs to turn on the rest of the basement lights. This was annoying bc there wasn’t a ton of light before getting to the second light switch.
At the top of the stairs, I had a smart switch connected to a dumb bulb and had smart switches throughout the rest of the basement. However, I also had Hue lights down there for ambiance.
Now, if only the Blue Series was launched back then – I could have all basement lights turn on (including the Hue lights) and then could use scene control (multi-taps) to change the colors.
Wow, thank you Eric! I’m super excited that there will finally be a decent smart switch in the zigbee space, and not being tied to a specific ecosystem is a huge plus. Hopefully this will become a flagship product for you… it certainly looks great so far!
Oh… and for the curious, there was no bot involved in my discovery that pre-orders were open. Just pure happenstance
I know I’ve been sharing videos all day and you guys may be tired of them, but I had to share this bc it’s insane to me how fast Zigbee bindings are.
In the video below, there are 13 Hue bulbs connected to 3x different circuits (one of the circuits has the Inovelli switch on).
On the circuit with the Inovelli switch, the switch is put in Smart Bulb Mode (ie: leaves 100% power to the bulb and digitally sends signals to the hub and/or bulbs).
I’ve also removed the 500ms delay, so it’s “near-instant”!
This is so cool! Can’t wait until the Blue series preorders ship out so I can play around with the 2 that I ordered for myself!
You’re still planning to make a second release of the switches with the chips that can be OTA updated to Matter down the line right?
Man I am so excited about this, I can barely focus (currently writing instructions for Home Assistant ZHA and am having a hard time amidst the excitement). It’s crazy how smooth this is.
Anyway, to answer your question, yes, our ultimate goal is to release these with MG24 to allow OTA updates from Zigbee to Matter. I just talked to the manufacture today and received the following response:
In other words, the evaluation (eva) kit should be released in May and they have ordered them to do testing. I’m not entirely clear on when we would be able to officially put these in the switches for release. My best educated guess would be Q4 2022.
Thanks for the info and for being so transparent on the progress! I’m setting aside a chunk of my first paycheck for more of these after I move into my new place in July.
Today I have been testing 3-way & 4-way smart-switch-to-smart-switch setups (with the latest firmware). The binding has been working great and will be awesome for people that want notifications, scenes, etc. on multiple or all switches in a 3, 4, 5-way configuration.
This is my 3-way test but the 4-way worked just as good.
Speaking of crazy scenarios, is there a mode that allows you to completely divorce a specific 2-1 switch from its connected load (like smart bulb mode but where you could still independently control the load from your automation hub)?
I have a switch near my back door that controls the light on the back porch. I don’t really need this light to be controllable with a physical switch if I can set it up to work with time conditions (I currently achieve this with a Kasa switch). What I’d like to do is replace this with an Inovelli Blue 2-1 and do the following:
Would this be possible with the current implementation of smart bulb mode? Or could this feature be requested (default smart bulb mode could always power on the load but there could be a configuration to have more granular control)?
Not sure I’m explaining that well but it is a use case I’ve wanted to implement so figured you might want to know about it.
I think I’m following - I’m assuming the load is a smart bulb?
Edit: Or are you saying you’d want the switch to turn on/off via a time setting (so smart switch but dumb load) and at the same time, use your smart switch to control something other than the load it’s attached to?
That would make a fun april fool if we can do this and change all switchs load control in the house.
I think I’m following you. There are two protection modes (i.e. the ability to disable something from working), local and remote. If I disable local protection, the switch paddle will no longer control the load physically wired to it. But you can still control the physically wired load via the hub, using your app, a rule, etc.
The paddle can still be used to send button presses for scenes.
You can do this presently with the reds as well.
I know this is a little late in the game. But, what is the technical reason you weren’t able to do an LED bar on the AUX switch? Did you have your engineering team look into how Leviton is able to do it with their companion switch? Maybe a V2 down the road?
