No light switches in three bedrooms

💡 Lighting
#1

First off, I have to say that from everything that I have read. This is an amazing little device and the community seems very helpful and supportive.

Second, I am here to try to get some answers before I actually go down the road of purchasing a C-8.

I have three bedrooms that have zero light switches in them. One has a ceiling fan with lights ( lights controlled by Hue and fan is pull chain ) The other two room are ceiling lights with pull chains. What I would like to do is use Lutro Picos in each room to turn the lights on and off and dim if needed. I am running Caseta on the first floor and have a Bridge Pro. Do I need any other hardware like the lamp dimmer or can I just do this via the C-8 with the Picos and Hue bulbs? I am not looking to cut open my walls and ceiling to run new lines from the fixture to an actual switch. This just not feasable.

Any all help is greatly appreciated.

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#2

Welcome to Hubitat!

Sounds like you're in good shape with what you already have. Adding the Pico remotes to the SmartBridge Pro, and then to Hubitat, will allow you to control the Hue lights from an App of your choice on your Hubitat hub. I do this all of the time to control nightstand lamps (Hue bulbs) with Pico remotes.

I personally use the Advanced Button Controller (ABC) community app to do this. It works amazingly well, and I find it simpler to configure than the buitl-in Hubitat provided apps.

Here is an example of an ABC app configured to control a Hue bulb from a Pico remote. The configuration below is nice because it makes dimming a bulb up/down as simple and pressing and holding the Pico Up Arrow or Down Arrow buttons, and releasing them when the bulb is at the correct brightness level.

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#3

You could also think about sticking a relay into the fan canopy for the fan motor side. My office has a single switch, but I put a fan in a few months back. I put a relay on the motor side so that I can at least turn the fan on/off via Hubitat.

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#4

Thinking about your setup a bit more... The only reason to add a Caseta plug-in dimmer module would be to act as a Lutron Clear Connect RF repeater. This might be needed if the Pico remotes cannot reliably communicate with the SmartBridge Pro due to a distance issue.

In the Caseta platform, the first Caseta plug-in dimmer module also acts as a repeater. Additional plug-in dimmer modules do NOT as a repeater. Lutron also sells a dedicated Caseta Repeater device, which may also be used to even further extend the range of a Caseta network.

See the following for more details.

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#5

@ogiewon since you’re using ABC app and hue bulbs, was wondering if you can you also configure button controller to change the color to a preset RGB color based on button press?

#6

ABC allows one to set the Hue, Saturation, and Level for an RGB bulb when a button is pushed, held, or released. It also allows one to set the Color Temperature when using a RGBW bulb in CT mode.

As for a 'preset RGB color' - what exactly do you mean? Are you referring to named colors, like 'orange, yellow, green, blue, purple'? If so, I do not believe it supports named colors as presets.

#7

Like can i press a button and the bulb will turn green, another button turns it red, and another button turns it purple.

#8

Sure... as long as you know the correct Hue, Saturation, and Level values for each color you want. You can empirically determine these by looking at the Color Bulb device details page after manually setting the bulb to the desired color.

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