Discuss need for Lutron Caseta bridge

I want to experiment with some Lutron Caseta devices like light switches or wall plugs. Is there any need to also buy the Lutron Caseta bridge, or will the devices connect directly to the Hubitat hub as is? I have the newer C-8 model. I do have a lot of different manufacturer's devices already that use various protocols, but I don't have any Lutron at the moment.

You would have to have a Lutron SmartBridge PRO to connect any CasΓ©ta device.

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Lutron uses its own proprietary wireless protocol (ClearConnect), not z-wave or zigbee or thread etc. That's why their bridge is required no matter what.

The Pro version of their bridge enables telnet integration with Hubitat, but the non-Pro bridge does not. The non-Pro bridge is more widely available (e.g. stocked at Home Depot), so you need to watch when shopping -- the Pro bridge can be found on Amazon and eBay though.

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Explain the significance of the Telnet integration...what does that do for me? I am an IT dinosaur from the late 60s and so Telnet is a term from the dark ages for me.

Telnet is how Hubitat and the Caseta bridge talk to each other.

Lutron Integrator | Hubitat Documentation

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As a network engineer, I can say that telnet is still widely used today.

That said as @hydro311 says, that's how hubitat and lutron talk to eachother. It's incredibly fast. Essentially telnet exposes everything (except motion sesnors) that are connected to the Pro Bridge 2 to Hubitat....

The hub you need is the L-BDGPRO2-WH. It will also allow you to use PICO's with anything on Hubitat as well

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That's interesting

For instance I have a pico on a pedestal on each night stand. 1/5 handle on off of the lamp (using a lifx bulb) 2/4 handle up/down dimming of said lamp. 3 (the center button) Turns off all lights in the house, locks all doors, turns off tv if on and a couple of other things.

Or you can mount them on the wall

image

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One small point of clarification. The Picos can either be paired to the Lutron hub and exposed to Hubitat as described above, OR they can be paired directly to a Lutron switch. If you use the "standard" instructions in the Lutron box for a 3- or 4- way switch, they will get paired directly to the switch and not be exposed to Hubitat. Not a big deal and can be changed after the fact but it can be a bit confusing.

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I resisted buying this for quite awhile. I really only wanted it to use the pico remotes. But I had a hard time justifying running yet another bridge, and spending that much on it.

Fast forward I now have 6 pico remotes which work great, and 3 castea fan controllers. The fan controls work so much better than anything else out there.

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So do the switches/dimmers. They're god damned tanks...Now available in Diva style (though I prefer the original style myself)

I have at least 40 Lutron devices. They NEVER give me any trouble. And many models require no neutral at the switch!

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They don't seem to have any three-way switches, or maybe just not on the Hubitat compatibility list? Yeah, I am not keen on buying yet another expensive hub. I have a lot of stuff built up over the years of experimenting (hey, I'm retired so have nothing interesting to do). But unfortunately I have got some stovepipes now that don't talk to some parts of my menagerie. Like, the Wyze devices don't talk to Hubitat, but do talk to Google Home and Alexa. Some of the Wifi stuff talks to Smartthings but not to Hubitat. My best barking dogs through my Sonos speakers respond to motion sensors on Smartthings but not to Hubitat. I suppose I could work harder and get everything integrated, but am not as interested in tinkering as I once was.

Many people don't do wired three-way switches with Caseta because it's so easy to wall mount a Pico. You can make three-way, four-way, whatever. No wiring required.

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That is the way I did my 3 and 4 ways. In fact, the Caseta dimmer instructions explicitly tell you how to do so.

Duh! Thanks for reminding me of a functionality that I hadn't yet connected the dots on. The problem I have with most of these expensive toys is what to do when I decide to move. What a hassle to replace all my toys with the legacy switches.

Yeah, but what to do if you are replacing existing switches? Are the Caseta switches wired so that I can swap one of them in for a 3-way switch? So, for example, I could have one switch wired the normal way with a Caseta, and the other switches would operate as per normal but I could then control the whole mess with routines or the app?

In a three-way switch installation, you install the Caseta switch at the primary switch location, short out the wiring at the secondary location, and replace the secondary switch with a Pico. The Pico can either be paired to the primary Caseta switch or to the hub.

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The pico's are designed to make them 3 way...

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Just remove one traveler on each end then cap the line on one end and mount the pico...and the switch

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