I just installed my Inovelli "Black" LZW31 dimmer. All went quite smoothly. I had installed the custom driver from Innovelli prior to pairing the dimmer. It was automatically selected. I noticed the driver also created a child device for the RGB LED bar on the dimmer:
This child device can be accessed like any other RGB bulb in Rules Machine. It appears I can used the LED bar as a status indicator to, for example, turn red to indicate an open garage door. I tried this and it does sort of work. However the LED settings in the main dimmer device get altered from their set values when the LED is accessed in this way.
Supposedly only the "Red" Inovelli dimmer with scene controls offer the notification feature. The child device for the "Red" dimmer has a different child device for its LED.
Any "gotchas" trying to use the LED in this way?
The dimmer itself works flawlessly. I'm using it with incandescent decorative bulbs in a dining room ceiling fixture, as the incandescent bulbs offer very low dimming levels for night light use. I needed to tweak the minimum dim value at 38% to set the lowest brightness achievable on the 5-40 watt bulbs.
What exactly gets altered when you use it? I haven't tried their drivers lately, but this is a recent addition. It's not quite "notifications," but it's something you can do on either Black or Red devices to get pseudo-notifications. I use something similar to indicate my location mode (I wrote my own driver for this a while back, but it looks like Inovelli's follows the same concept).
I can change the color and intensity (dimmer percentage value) from a Rule. When I do, the parent and child devices both show the new color and intensity. Those are the only values changed in the parent.
Whatever color and intensity is set with a Rule becomes the default color and intensity. They are used used by the dimmer in the same way during normal dimmer operation.
There is no way to return to the parent "default" values, as whatever is set becomes the new default.
It may be a limitation of the driver, but special LED functions like flashing and "chase" are not accessible.
This could still be useful, though, as long as the Rule restores the color to the desired default when the notification is cleared.
Those are the notifications feature, which is only available on the Red Series (one of the feature differentiations between the two; this is a device/firmware decision, not a driver thing).
For the LED bar? That is the intent of this feature, so I'm not sure what wouldn't be working as intended. There is a different child device you can create to control the default level of the actual dimmer load (at least on Red, but I think it's still available on Black--might not be).
After playing with it some more, I see it is working as expected.
I had read somewhere that the parameter sets were identical between Black and Red devices and that a driver might be written to access them, but this may have been incorrect. The Switch Parameters documented on the Black dimmer instruction sheet match those exposed by the driver (and are probably the only ones supported in the firmware).
I still like the capability! I can have the dimmer turn a certain color to indicate an alert situation. This will be most obvious if I set the idle LED bar to never time out and display at a high brightness. If the dimmer is on and set to a low dim value, the color change will still show, but may only be in a small portion of the bar, and less obvious.
The rule just needs to set the default value when the alert clears.
There are gaps in the parameter numbers in the Black manual, specifically 12, 16, 18, 19, 20.
16 is listed in the Red manual as "LED Strip Effect". The rest are related to the Red's power reporting feature.
Interesting that the Black manual says two Config Button presses will clear notifications, but the driver doesn't appear to support a Notification method, just a way of altering the LED color.
Yeah, must have been a typo--guessing they started with the Red manual and just pared it down. The parameter number gaps are probably due to the fact that the Black firmware is based on the Red firmware and it was probably easier for them to not change the parameter numbers for the sake of keeping them sequential (many Z-Wave devices don't, and for far less apparent reasons). In any case, it's definitely a firmware difference on the devices: the Black just doesn't support the notification parameter or scene events, no matter which driver you use. But them allowing easy adjustment of the "regular" LED bar color is a cool way to allow you to squeeze vaguely notification-like capabilities out of them.
Good luck experimenting! (It's fun to see what you can use these for.)
This child device is for the color used to indicate dimming or light switch status.
There should be a separate function in the main driver to create child devices as notifications abd startNotification and stopNotification with a code from Inovelli Toolbox
There are a number of child device options in the parent device, including one for RGB LED control. This one was enabled by default when I installed the dimmer.
Since this is the "Black" dimmer without notification support, that child device option was missing from the parent options.
