I have several Leviton VRCZ4 devices ... 4 button zone controller ... which I bought and configured over 10 yrs ago using 100% Leviton stuff.
I am selectively migrating devices to Hubitat.
I added one of them into my HE 2.2.3.148 Z-Wave network ... and was partially successful.
The driver that was auto-chosen was/is the VRCS1 1-button scene controller.
I observe that there is also a built driver for the VRCS4 4-button scene controller.
The VRCZ4 is also referenced here
I am a software developer, but have never coded a driver for Hubitat or other control system.
Q: What can I do to assist in getting the VRCZ4 more fully supported under Hubitat?
I'm new to HE and would also be willing to help fund development and testing of working drivers for my 15+ Leviton VRCZ4 and 6 VRCS4 button controllers that I've accumulated over the years, in order to get these devices fully supported by HE. If each button press could be received by HE, a set of rules could execute macros for scenes, etc.
For quite some time I've seen and laughed at electricians' conventional wall switch installations that often have up to 8 gangs of unmarked paddle switches (wonder whether occupants remember which is which). In contrast, Lutron dimmers (except custom engraved panels or plates) typically require an entire gang box to control only one or two switches.)
I've long thought that Leviton controllers could be a great solution for (1) minimizing the overall footprint on the wall and (2) improving ergonomics without looking techy. These could yield big improvements in WAF! Leviton's catalog of Z-wave devices also indicates that custom key engraving is available for these devices, and custom keys would be another giant leap toward improving WAF... (however, my inquiries to Leviton customer support regard to device compatibility and engraving have gone unanswered, sadly.) Both versions are available in colors including black and brown. (Ever had to paint wall switches to remain unobtrusive on a dark wall?)
If Leviton's wall-mounted "button controllers" would work with HE in a stable, consistent, reliable manner (without the need for coding, tweaking, etc.), I believe that their stylish appearance, ergonomics (in theory) and wall-mount configuration would be a tremendous benefit to all HE users. The VRCZ4 "zone controller" version has both left and right positions on each button (bottom row is for dimming), and with 10 positions this device could pack a lot of punch in a small footprint on a single-gang wallbox without the need for double button presses, etc.
In theory, HE already supports the VRCS4 scene controller; therefore, my first HE project will be to control a few Leviton plug-in lamp and switch modules. I will appreciate any working driver updates that other users might provide, especially for the VRCZ4. Thanks!
I do also have one VRCZ4 which partially works - the right and left sides of the zone buttons register as the same, and the LEDs aren't responsive (1 and 3 stay off, 2 and 4 stay on). It would be nice if it could distinguish the two sides as separate buttons but I have no insight as to how that can be achieved.
I don't think Leviton are really supporting these any more - I have no actual knowledge but they are pretty old now.
Which driver are you using?
I have tried multiple built-in drivers (Generic Z-wave and Leviton VRCS4) and have not been able to get the VRCZ4 to do much.
I also have this question about which driver to use. As a specifier, buyer, installer, and user of many Leviton devices across all product lines for nearly 50 years, I am quite disappointed (to put it mildly) that Leviton is not supporting these devices as stated above by others; HD, Gordon, and other Leviton distributors currently offer both Z-wave products for sale. Recently I contacted Leviton product support but received no replies. Leviton's catalogs indicate custom engraving for these controller buttons but their order form is no longer there. Founders Evsor and Isidore Leviton would turn over in their graves if they knew!
A fundamental reason HE is such a great product is because many products on the most common platforms are "compatible" and supported directly from the HE website. Wish that this formerly reputable manufacturer (Leviton) would do the same. After all, Z-Wave is supposed to a "standard;" what does this mean, anyway? (I served with Leviton's Al Zaretsky on the former EIA (now CEA) CEBus standards committees for over a decade but our work never went anywhere, sadly.)
Leviton's scene and zone controllers are stylish products that would have great appeal (think WAF) by minimizing the wall footprint, if only they would work properly, without tinkering.
Perhaps other HE users can share working drivers as installers cannot find compatible wall-mounted controllers from an alternate manufacturer (Eaton, perhaps?) for mounting in a single-gang wallbox behind standard Decora wall plates.
Sorry I missed your question for so long... I'm just using the VRCS4 driver, and then trigger actions using the button controller app.
Sadly I don't remember doing anything very special to get this working - it took several attempts to get it to pair successfully, but that always seemed to be the case both with the VRCZ4 and the VRCS4 (and both with HE and my old Vera Plus). Do you not see any button pushes register if you set the device to debug logging?
Using the Generic Z-Wave switch driver I got the top button (of 4) to work on the VRCZ4.
I don't recall getting anything to work on with the VRCS4 driver.
I had no trouble getting things to pair.
Unfortunately, I will be away for a few months and won't be able to test.
I have 3 VRCZ4s and the only way I was able to get anything out of them was using the VRCS4 driver, but it's not very useful compared to what I was able to do with the VRCZ4s in Vera (could use all 8 buttons independently, the up/down buttons would dim whatever scene you last triggered with one of the 8 buttons, and the built-in load was its own device).
I dunno what it would take either, but any way I could help make these useful in HE I'm up for.
If you can edit, I didn't see how. In Vera I could also control the LEDs independently of the buttons- set them to green, orange, red or off. I used them for presence indicators to show what roommates were home.
I think the Leviton controllers were set up completely differently by Vera - with direct associations so that they would control the target devices directly rather than via the hub. That's also why the dim up/down buttons worked so quickly/directly. I have got these button working in HE - was easier using the "Dimmer Button Controller" app rather than regular "Button Controller", but you're right it's a pale shadow of how they worked under Vera.
To be fair, Vera (micasaverde) probably coded that when these were new cutting edge devices. I don't see a lot of motivation for HE to go to that development effort at this time as I don't think they're very popular now.
Could you get these LED changes to work "out of the box" with vera? I remember seeing reference to this in their forums back in the day, but I didn't think it worked with their standard driver - I never saw how to do it.
It would certainly be nice to have a more capable driver for these under HE - at least being able to use all the buttons on the VRCZ4. Controlling the LEDs would be cool as well if the commands were documented anywhere.
Yes, "out of the box", but with advanced properties. You had to set a property to a value (0=off, 1=green, 2=red, etc). But you could do that within regular scenes without changing anything about how the VRCZ4 was detected out of the box.
Yea, I'd be happy with just button and load function without LED or dimmer functionality (though LEDs and dimmer would be a nice bonus).
I've just completed porting my App and Driver for the Leviton VRCZ4-M04 Zone Controller from SmartThings to Hubitat Elevation. I'll probably do some additional tweaking, but you should find the current versions fully functional -- have a try and let me know?
I've added the app and driver to my HE, but unfortunately my power is out so I can't test yet D:
I don't think they're currently added to my network. Can you easily refresh my memory on how to put them in include/exclude mode? Was it something like holding 1 and 3 (or was that hard reset?)
Thanks, and once power is back and I've got them added, I'll let you know how it goes!
I've also installed the app and driver, but haven't taken the plunge yet to try switching over my one zone controller to it - it looks like it works quite differently from the HE scene controller driver (which I just have linked to a button controller app). Is it more based around setting up direct associations between the zone controller buttons and other zwave devices?
@mpk I have to apologize for not writing again sooner. I do have your new driver and app hooked up now to my one VRCZ4 (which was previously just using the VRCS4 driver with button controller).
I am not using it to full potential, as TBH I am just triggering hubitat scenes rather than having it associate to specific devices. The scenes are doing a few things like setting specific colors on RGBW bulbs, so I'm not sure how that can be achieved through direct device associations - presumably the VRCZ4 is way too old to know about things like that!
Anyway it works well - I do like that I can once again use the righthand side of the buttons to turn a scene off again.
If I try to switch between scenes a lot, then something does still get confused, but I suspect that might be on the controller side as I see a very different set of messages coming through in the logs (can try to capture if of interest). Sometimes it's laggy or fails to set some devices but again I think that is either the controller, or perhaps just z-wave congestion.
One other thing: it doesn't manage to set the LEDs successfully in this mode. I think it did when I briefly did try a direct device association for one button, but when setting a HE scene, in the logs I see the led setting commands go by twice - the first seems to be setting it appropriately, then another follows right after which sets them all to 0,0,0,0. Here's a log screenshot to show...
Glad to hear you've tried it, and that it's working for you (mostly, anyways).
It's really designed to work with "zones", where each zone (button) can map to a set of switches (i.e., you can assign multiple switches to a single button). I've never tested it with scenes (or even tried using Hubitat scenes, as yet), so I'm not entirely surprised to hear that it might act up in that situation.
And are you saying the LED issues are limited to scene-oriented use?
I wonder if it might be worth using the actual device-control functionality (which is not based on z-wave associations, BTW) instead of scenes, and then using Rule Machine or some other app to handle the color-changes separately? Otherwise, we could look into how scenes are interacting with the driver/app, if you're game to do some more debugging on your end...
Thanks @mpk - I must say it has actually been working pretty well. Although I mention occasional lags and delays, I get these with the VRCS4 controllers as well, so that is clearly nothing to do with your driver! The most obvious thing you lose with using HE scenes is use of the dim up/down buttons, presumably because the app doesn't know what devices its expected to control (this is fairly apparent in the logs)
I'm not quite sure yet how I would get the behavior I want from the device control model - I guess I've using it in a kind of hybrid zone/scene mode. One button did map well to that device model so I programmed it in that mode for a while, which is where I believe I could see the different LED behavior. With other buttons I want to set some dimmers on while some others off when a button is pressed and I couldn't see how to do that other than via HE scenes. It would certainly also be possible to use a hybrid approach as you suggest, handling some switches directly, and some via Rule Machine triggers - something to think about. But I can also dig more into the scene app interaction.
Sorry about my mention of z-wave associations - that was just an assumption I carried over from how I understood my old Vera controller sets these devices up. They would have you define a set of vera scenes, then map these to the controller buttons, at which time I believe it would program the direct device associations to the controller. Anything that the Leviton controller couldn't handle (such as delayed actions) were handled through the vera in a more "button controller" way. That was all pretty clever, but is super customized to the Leviton command set (clearly they had inside information)
To start with I'll revert one or two buttons from scene to device control mode, and can see what difference that makes to LED behavior. I don't want to change too much as I sense a somewhat low family approval rating with these controller, and I don't want to provoke more confusion!
Thanks for the update. No need to apologize about z-wave associations -- there's actually a fair bit vestigial association code in the driver (along with a bunch of scene-oriented event handlers) that I inherited from earlier VRCS4 SmartThings drivers, so a cursory look through the driver source could easily give that impression. And FWIW, I did feel initially that z-wave associations would be the best way to go.
But my approach evolved, necessarily. over time. My first VRCZ4 was actually working with one command-set, but then I couldn't get my second one to respond to those same commands, so I had to shift to a different command strategy.
I did leave all that other stuff in there, though, thinking it might prove useful in future...and I wonder now if you might be able to make profitable use of those scene-handling events?
Definitely curious to follow your progress, in any case. Also curious about the "family approval rating", as I've heard others make similar comments. Personally, I love these controllers, but come to think of it, I suppose the rest of my family isn't all that crazy about them either...
I think the VRCZ4 has lower approval really than the VRCS4, as the two sides per button is a step too far. I know what they do but it's not readily discoverable for others.
But it's also reliability, as - even before under Vera, with the leviton controller doing direct associations to control the other lighting - there are always times you hit a button and nothing happens. Maybe one time out of 10? The controller sits there with its LED blinking stupidly for a long time, and (if lucky) the action occurs a minute later. Could be z-wave mesh issues but I have enough devices around that the mesh should be solid. It's almost like the leviton controller itself has routing amnesia. I don't generally get that problem with my old minimotes, which are doing much the same thing.
I was thinking about this earlier this week as we settled down to watch TV - someone hit the scene controller for the lights and nothing happened. Family comments were literally...
Wife: "These lights were sent to vex me"
Son: "Does it try to read the soul of whoever presses the button or something? Like to see if they're worthy?"
I sometimes think about just replacing them all with Picos, but their button arrangement doesn't really match the leviton capabilities. The four action buttons, PLUS dim up/down, was nice (though I don't at present have that all working with HE). Multi-tap on the pico isn't an answer - it's even less discoverable than the two-sided zone controller buttons!
Well, I don't know...I always thought an on/off rocker switch should be straightforward enough, and having four of them ganged on one unit isn't too much more to ask.
Agreed, though, that performance (reliability) was a huge factor, and here the migration from SmartThings to Hubitat has made a world of difference. While the VRCZ4 buttons are wanting in terms of tactile response, for me (and, I think, my family) the real culprit was always latency -- I mean, anyone can miss flipping a switch on a careless stab, but it was really the having to wait 2 or 3 seconds at times (or even more) before knowing whether you'd succeeded that was the most maddening. With the Hubitat, that's pretty much gone, and even the occasional lag is still sub-second now.
I have to say that your son's quip is perhaps the funniest thing I've heard in a very long time. Please extend my compliments!
Again, although I haven't looked into scenes yet, I could see where they might not work with my current VRCZ4 dimming (up/down) logic, which depends on reading the current level of the connected switch(es) and then looping an increment against that starting level until the button is released -- not sure you can "read" the level of a scene the same way, so maybe that's an issue here?
Might be worth logging the up/down activity of a VRCS4 (if you have one) to see what the message traffic looks like while dimming a scene.
