I have the discontinued Inovelli fan/light controller in my office, controlling a fan with an uplight, downlight (the two lights are just tied together right now), and fan. The Inovelli unit is only working about 50% of the time now for the light, so it's time to replace it. I was contemplating an Inovelli Blue canopy unit, but I don't care much for the Inovelli switch they're pairing it too. It just seems like it wouldn't work the best... so I was trying to come up with an alternative. I thought I could use a Zooz Zen35 in smart bulb mode, use the mirror app to keep the Inovelli canopy dimmer in sync with the dimmer on the scene controller, and use the scene buttons to control the fan speed. If there's enough room in the canopy I could even put a second small controller in there so I could separate the top and bottom lights, for dim mood lighting. Has anyone else used a scene controller with an Inovelli canopy module? I'm wondering whether the dimmer would work, and how responsive it would be? Or should I just get the zigbee switch so it can be directly paired? What have other people done?
They aren't using the Zen devices directly on a fan, they only want to use it as a button to control the Inovelli fan module. Zen 30 as button -> Hubitat -> Inovelli Fan module -> Fan
There is no reason you can't use the Zen devices to simply be a button controller for another device. You only need hot, neutral, and ground at the Zen, and provide the Inovelli module full-time power without going through the Zen.
I am not familiar enough with the Inovelli module to say if this device is capable of being controlled directly by the hub in this way, but I can't think of a reason this basic concept shouldn't work. I am too lazy to look up this canopy controller, but I thought it was basically a standalone device with the wall switch being a fancy remote control?
The canopy module is just a Zigbee controlled canopy module, very similar to any of the many proprietary ceiling fan canopy modules from Hampton Bay and others. I know in theory it should work, I'm just wondering about the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor). I'm worried there may be a noticeable delay from the time the button is pressed to the time the canopy module responds, and of course the main problem is that if the hub is offline then I can't control it at all.
Yes, both of those are real concerns, and there is a slight delay, if the hub is in the middle processing messages, so dimming, and fan speed changes are a few hundred ms. It's not like pushing a physical switch the the fan or light instantly comes on, and your WAF factors are well founded.
If you really want it to "work as fast as it can, in a setup skipping the hub, then you need ZB Direct Association or for HE see here" - Which a blue canopy module can do, but most ZEN things are ZW, not ZB, so you can't do DA across the protocols. If your using a ZB canopy module (blue), and you want DA (which will give you the fastest hubless control), then you need a ZB switch/dimmer/scene controller (Moes/Sonoff/Legrand make these or even an Inovelli device is in development). Or you can do DA with ZW as well, and a Zen35, but then you need a ZW canopy module (Red Series). Or you can even do DA with Matter, then you need a White series VTM36, and a Matter switch or scene controller. Matter DA is newer, and less supported, versus the ZB or ZW choices.
If you crossing protocols, then a hub is going to be in the middle (HE or HA), and while this will work, it will have the exact issues (slower response and inoperable if hub down) that you suspect.
I've never looked much at direct association. It looks promising if I can find a Zigbee scene controller I like. One thing I don't quite understand though... if I have one button controlling the fan speed, how does one button cycle through low/medium/high/off with direct association?
Assuming you want to do this with ZB bindings, and you want to setup the bindings in HE, see here. You can set different buttons or taps to specific fan or light levels (scene control). Or for a more generalized discussion, using HA - See the discussion about FanModeControl, around multi-tap or cycle, in this article. It somewhat depends if you have level control on a dimmer (setup in smart bulb mode) or if you just binding buttons to the fan (cycle, or mult-tap), so you have some choices. In all cases, in HE, your going to need the Zigbee Bindings App to set this up and understand the Canopy modules endpoints. Sounds like your settling in going with a ZB approach (which is the most commonly used DA/binding approach.
There are similar (but different) schemes for Matter or ZW, but I don't believe HE supports Matter association setups (yet), but there is alot of recent activity in the HA (and Inovelli) space around getting Matter bindings working (and lots of FW updates to white series devices)