After months of renovations (and planning switches, lights, etc.), I'm finally at the point where my electrician is trimming out. I decided on Inovelli Red dimmers to control a few Hue light setups (everything from a single recessed light, to a few, to 21 recessed soffit lights). Everything is on neutral wiring and single pole, which fortunately simplifies things.
No problems including the switches (well, I did have to factory reset a couple before they could be found), and I figured out via Inovelli support that I needed to set Parameter 52 to 1 to indicate smart bulbs (though I'm wondering how that will affect a set of outdoor lights that is a mix of Hue and incandescent, on the same switch).
That resolved the awful popcorning and strobing I was initially getting. However, I cannot figure out how to enable dimming at the switch. Do I need to associate groups or tweak some other settings? I've messed with ramping but that has no effect. The switches are on/off state only, no matter what. If I hold down to dim, it does nothing until it ultimately turns off. It must think it's dimming because I have to then push the up button for a while before the lights are actually on again.
Any insight appreciated because my electrician asked me to make a decision on keeping these switches by Monday. Wasn't sure whether to ask this on the Hue, Inovelli, or Hubitat forums! But since I only see this being fixed at the Hubitat interface, I figure this must be the place!
you can't dim both Hue and incandescent bulbs on the same circuit. Hue bulbs must be powered at 100% always. So you could have a scenario where Hue bulbs are dimmed as desired while incandescent are at 100%. But cutting the power to smart bulbs creates other user experience issues.
Besides setting parameter 52, also make sure to set "Disable Local Control" to "Yes". That keeps the power going to the circuit. You need that for smart bulbs.
When you set up the dimmer to control smart bulbs the dimmer becomes a big button device. Hubitat, not the dimmer, is directing the lights based on the buttons you push. So you have to program each button tap/hold in a Hubitat app. You can do it via a basic "Button Controller" app or use a button device in Rule Machine. See: [HOW-TO] Hubitat: Setting Up "Scenes" in Rule Machine - Hubitat - Tips & Tricks - Inovelli Community
Here is a hard to see Rule Machine setup for my kitchen lights
Okay, I figured that wouldn't be an ideal scenario with the smart/incandescent mix but I have no choice since some are decorative candelabra bulbs you can see in the fixture, and I don't think I'm going to check off the WAF box unless they're Edison style. Not a huge deal, as I don't have a strong need to dim those.
Yes, I see that Hubitat is reporting firmware at 1.47. Not sure how to check the .otz but I assume that would likewise be current.
Done. I LOVE the Package Manager.
Okay, I was wondering about that because I seen mention of disabling local control (or both, which made no sense to me). Done.
Yes, I was figuring that Hubitat would need to effect the dimming but couldn't figure out how it would know what bulbs are on a given controller (actual circuitry/local control makes that a non-issue). Off to learn Rule Machine!
If you have a C7 hub you probably should update to 1.48 as there are some S2/700 fixes. Hubitat reports "Target 0", the OTZ file, which in your case is 1.47. If you've got a C7 hub there is a new app called "Device Firmware Updater" that can update both targets, I believe. You need to run the update twice, once for each file.
Hmm, I'll take a look but the other problem is that there is very little space between the sockets, so the bulbs almost certainly have to be that narrow candle style.
More, importantly, I'm dimming now! Thanks so much!
Can you explain your Button 8 held rule? If your kitchen island lights are off, what does it do (5 --> Fade:0) before starting to raise? I figured I'd just try adding this to my own Button 8 held rule, but while I can get to the point that I'm setting up the conditional action and then selecting the IF -> THEN, at that point I couldn't figure out what to select for the capability for Action Condition.
That part of the rule is for holding the physical button up when the lights are off. The CoCoHue integration won't turn the lights on as a result of a "Start raising" event. So you have to turn them on before starting the raise.
Ha...sorry, I marked the wrong post as the solution. Fixed.
So, I'm getting some weirdness today. The switches I tweaked yesterday were completely ignoring me with any button presses. So, I figured "local control" disabling might be the culprit and when I reenabled local control the switches went back to responding. This is really odd since they weren't ignoring me yesterday.
Also, I had only set up Button 8 push and held, and realized that I couldn't STOP the dimming process. So, it's either all the way bright or all the way dimmed. I figured that your Button 6 rules must be relevant to this, but when I set those same rules (stop changing lights), it doesn't seem to work. In fact, it made things wonkier in that they don't want to dim at all.
IS that what you're doing with the Button 6 rules? Any idea why local control is literally disabling local control at the switch? EDIT: Okay, I see that the Button 6 mapping is indeed for these releases. That's great.
One switch has completely stopped responding locally or remotely. I can't even factory reset it because it's ignoring all button presses, even after cutting power to it for awhile (and enabling local control). Any way to truly force a reset otherwise?
Yes, Button 6 is necessary to stop raising/lowering.
I don't have any good ways of diagnosing your control problems. To me they sound like they might be Z-Wave network issues, but I can't tell.
One thing to do is to turn on logging for the dimmers. Any time you press a button there should be activity in the logs.
Another thing to do is to turn the dimmer on/off from the Device page. That will control the relay - which isn't what you want for smart bulbs, but will tell you if the device is responding to Z-Wave commands from the hub.
If you've been adding/removing a lot of Z-Wave devices I would suggest shutting down the hub from the Settings menu and removing the power for a minute. That will allow the Z-Wave radio to reset itself. After that you should run a Z-Wave repair. It may take a night or two for the Z-Wave network to find a good set of routes.
Okay, finally have my main living room dimmer acting appropriately, and was able to tie it to another Hue bulb in a nook in the same room that's on a different switch. Love that.
Yeah, I do Z-Wave repairs whenever I hit a wall and maybe that helped but the switches were acting so strange. I gave up on the one that is totally ignoring me and switched (no pun intended) it out for a Hue dimmer controller. I also got a couple Decora (the slightly nicer) Auroras to handle the soffit lights. But I'm in it to win it with the Inovellis in the living room and loft area.
I also uninstalled and reinstalled CoCoHue for the heck of it...just in case. When you install CoCoHue, it creates new CocoHue versions of each of the lights you added. So I have two of each light - a CocoHue version and a HueBridge version. Can I delete the latter?
I remain convinced that disabling local control is a no-go for me. Much like its description says, it is indeed disabling my ability to control the switch from the wall. Seems like the smart bulb mode should be enough to tell the switch to never cut power, no?
Oh, and speaking of, I got wife approval to change out the 4 candle incandescents for Hue bulbs. Yeah! As you said, mixing smart and incandescent just wasn't going to be, well, smart.
If you don't disable local control then the power gets cut to the load. Smart Bulb mode just says "power is 0 or 100%", I believe.
Your rule machine rules should be controlling the bulbs directly - Button 1 held (bottom of the rocker is pushed once) turns off the bulbs in my example rule.
If there is a driver parameter that isn't doing what you think it should you can try making a change, saving preferences, and change back to the original, saving preferences. This forces a re-save of the parameters to the device.
Okay, I heard back from the owner of Inovelli (Eric, who is active here as well I believe) and he confirmed that local control should indeed be disabled. So, quite unsurprisingly, you were correct in that respect.
The reason it was ignoring me, I think? The exact example you gave. I hadn't yet set Button 1 push/held! Big time duh there. That said, I am almost positive I was trying dimming as well, and was being ignored. But now everything is working fine with local control disabled.
Also realized that I should use groups instead of individual devices/lights when setting up rules, because much easier when there are a lot of lights involved.
The switches are working like a charm now and I learned a lot along the way. Looking forward to setting up other rules, like turning on every desired light in the house when walking in the front door.
