I have smartthings hub, Inovelli Fan + Light LZW36, and Illumin smart bulb. I don’t want to use the RF light controller and instead have the light portion of the switch control an Illumin smart bulb through z-wave association. I have successfully used the smartthings z-wave association to pair other bulbs with standard on/off switches. It does not work with the LZW36. The LZW36 creates 2 virtual devices in addition to the main fan + light device is smart things. Trying to associate with the either of the virtual devices fails indicating the configure method does not exist in the logs. I can associate with the parent physical switch. I tried pair to all groups including both 2 and 4. None of them worked, but they did successfully save. The switch in paired with the smartthings hub with S0 security.
The documentation indicates I am able to use z-wave association with the LZW36 switch. Please tell me the procedure to make this work.
I think you had the right idea, but due to the way the hardware and firmware are set up, you would need to process things a little differently.
The are no Zwave commands to tell an associated device to “toggle” itself. With Zwave, you can only send “On” commands or “Off” commands. Since the light button on the LZW36 is a single button, it doesnt really know if you are trying to turn the associated devices on or off, it just knows that you pushed the button.
What the LZW36 does is send a command to associated devices based on the state the physical switch is changing to. If the physical light is on and you press the light button, it will turn the physical light off and send the off command to associated devices. If the physical switch is off, it will turn everything on. This works well in some situations, but not when using smart bulbs connected to the fan canopy. Since you need to disable the relay in order to use smart bulbs, the physical light is always locked on. This means it will always send the “off” command to associated devices whenever you press the button.
A couple possible solutions:
If you use association group 2, then a single-press of the dim-up/dim-down button will send the on/off commands to associated devices. This gives you on/off control, but the buttons are tiny and the main light button wont do anything.
If you hard-wire the lights to always be on and leave the relay enabled, everything should work as you expect it to (Use groups 3 and 4 for this association)
If you leave the relay disabled, you can use group 4 association to control the dimming, and then use scenes to trigger the lights when the main button is pressed. This may have additional lag due to the way ST processes most everything through the cloud.