I'm new to hubitat. I've had SmartThings since V1. My smartthings hub is probably a decade old and still running. I'm hoping I can get the same longevity out of hubitat.
So I saw these Philip WIZ downlights for like $15 each. You can customize the color temperature. So I thought "wow can't loose".
The only issue I have is physical switch control. Philips doesn't make a wall switch so my current switch cuts power to the lights. It's not a problem really because these lights have a non volitile memory so the last settings on the lights are used when turned back on.
But I'd like a switch that controls the WIZ lights through it's IP protocol.
So I read that hubitat supports WIZ through the community app. And then someone suggested I purchase a zigbee switch like Inovelli Z-Wave Switch (Red Series) and use Hubitat to relay the on off .
You can do this a lot of ways, but the easiest is probably to start with an app like Button Controller. The Red Series device (Z-Wave, not Zigbee, BTW, but not relevant for this purpose) sends button events with taps, holds, and releases, so what you'd want to do is treat that like a button device and ignore the fact that it could also be a switch or dimmer (in fact, you'll also want to use the "disable local control" option and, if the dimmer, likely enable one of the "smart bulb mode" options, the former of which is the most important since it stops physical presses from cutting power to the attached device).
In Button Controller, you can assign arbitrary actions to respond to any button event. So most likey you'd want something like "button 1 pushed" (top paddle tapped once) to turn on the lights, "button 2 pushed"* (bottom paddle tapped once) to turn off the lights, and so on. You can see the Button Controller docs here: Button Controller - Hubitat Documentation (the actions are very similar to Rule Machine, which itself can be daunting, but I think Button Controller makes this easier since the "triggers"--when you want the actions to run--are already sorted out for you: button events!). But, there are multiple ways to do this, so you may ultimately find something that suits your preferences. This is where I'd recommend starting otherwise!
*EDIT: This is what Hubitat's built-in driver maps this to; Inovelli's maps this to "button 1 held" (not actually a hold, though holds are also events these devices register--just how they did down-taps in their driver). You will have to look at what events get generated and respond to those as you desire no matter what driver you use--that's the general idea.
I've solved a similar situation by wiring the box to leave the light on and using a Zooz Zen 34 switch. Then use Button Controller to control the light however you like. The main disadvantage is that the only way to cut power completely, short of getting into the box, is cutting off the breaker. I don't really find that a problem in day to day use though.
I am working on this right now with a zooz zen74 switch. Getting it to control simple on off was pretty easy. It is now controlling light level that is being a pain. The switch has a simple option to disable the relay control from the switch. Seems to work pretty good once it is setup.
First once the switch is added make sure you are using the community provided Zooz Zen Dimmer Advanced driver. Once this driver is configured you will update it's configuration for option 15 to "Disable Physical Paddle Control".
Now the switch should allow you to change it's state in Hubitat, and leave the relay on for the electrical circuit.
Now in Rule Machine you need to create two rules as below.
The arrows point to my Wiz Bulb being controlled. And the Trigger device is the Zooz Zen switch. This rule handles the simple turn on and off.
In this rule it is a little bit more complicated. First you need to set a local variable for the rule to use to store the Dim Level of the Switch. Then The rule simply activates any time the switch is held and the dimmer value changes. When that is detected it will set the local variable to the level of the zen switch and then change the light to that level. The green arrow simply points to that bulb being set to the expected value
If you want to enable scenes for the bulbs to use some of the preset color options, or light effects you will then want to go back to the settings and change the value to enable scene control. This will allow you to double, tripple, quad, quint press the buttons and then activate scenes from them. Because it has to wait to know if a scene is being activated this may delay the activation slightly by a second or 2 so keep that in mind. Once that is done each of those options represents a button push. up will be 3,5,7,9 and down will be 4,6,8.10. Then you can set the button controller app to use those buttons to activate a scene/light effect. So in my example i set doubletap up(Button 3) to activate the romance lights, and triple tap up(Button 5) for Movie time lights.
If I can just get to on and off would be fantastic. What I ended up doing was using IFTTT to tie in the wiz lights. What driver did you use for your WIZ lights?
