My whole house is full of hue dimmer switches. But since I only have my HE a couple of days I still have to pair them. I have paired one for about 4 days and it works reliable. I don't use a custom driver or app. Just the build in "Philips dimmer button controller" driver and a RM4 rule. Though I haven't figured out how to properly make a bulb to go up/down in brightness when holding a button and stop when releasing it. For the rest it's easy.
cool cool - I just wanted direction if it was better to pair the switch directly through HE or through the Hue Hub and the benefits of either way.
I connected it directly to HE. Because I don't want the extra delay from the hue bridge. And I don't want to use the hue bridge after moving the rest of the devices from it to HE. But that is a matter of opinion. If you do decide to use the bridge next to the HE you should watch out for the channels you set them on and your 2.4G wifi channel to make sure they don't interfere with each other.
My house is without repeaters for my zigbee devices, so all hue bulbs will be running off the hue hub for me for now. How many repeaters are you running for your setup ?
None as of yet. But I have a fairly small house. My HE is centrally positioned in the house and the longest distance between the hub and a device would be 6 meters with a brick wall in between. I might need a repeater for my garden one day though. But with the cheap Ikea plugs I'm not to concerned about this for now. Also I have already paired 7 Xiaomi door/window sensors to the HE and they work fine too. But again I'm only using it for 4 days now. So still a long way from solid proof.
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I wrote Dimmer Button Controller to make this easy. Choose the bulb(s) you want to control. Then for button 2 held, choose, for example, "Brighten" and tick the "Dim/brighten while held" option (button 2 can be left at plain "brighten" so it can be used to step up the brightness--and also this device doesn't send a "released" event for pushes, so it's all you can do without a hold). Button 3 would be similar except for dimming down.
All this does behind the scenes is call startLevelChange(up) (or startLevelChange(down)) on a hold and stopLevelChange on a release (for a push, unless configured otherwise, you'd just use the regular setLevel, which steps the brightness up or down once based on a calculated value relative to the current value). In Rule Machine or Button Controller, access to start/stop-level-change device commands is labeled something like "stop raising/lowering dimmers" and "stop raising/lowering dimmers," so that's what you can use there if you'd rather use stock apps and do this yourself.
The other part of the trick is knowing what button events your device sends when. In the case of the Hue Dimmer, all buttons will send "pushed" upon the release of a short-ish press. Buttons 2 and 4 will send "held" instead if you press (and hold) them for just a bit longer (doesn't take as long on these as some others I've seen, which I like). After a "held" (but not a "pushed"), a "released" event is sent when the button is released. The latter two facts can be used to create the desired effect with dimming while held (start on hold, stop on release). Different button devices may work differently, but both this and the Eria Dimmer work like this.
Ok, I didn't know about your app. I did try the Hubitat Button app, but it doesn't have the experience that I wanted. Your app on the other hand does! It's marvelous! Two cents of feedback though: A. The last button switches all lights off but in the process gives a warning (Error when running turn-off action: java.lang.NullPointerException: Cannot invoke method off() on null object);
B. The only thing I would love to have is to configure the speed of increment/decrement on the held buttons. Don't know if this is even possible.
For the rest you really hit the sweet spot in adding some extra's which I kinda mist on the Philips Hue Bridge, like adding extra lights to turn off while there not turned on by this device. And also the possibility to activate scenes on double press or held buttons. Though I can't understand why button 1 and 4 don't work for held. Because I have tried this with OpenHab and that works. Could we use the information from OpenHab to get button 1 and 4 held working?
They must be synthesizing held as the device inherintly doesn't provide this. I'm not a fan of doing this, also there's no way to create a released event, so you still wouldn't have uniform function across all 4 buttons...
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How did you pair the hue dimmer str8 to the HE? Thanks....
Done, thanks so much !!!!
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@rmadrid20
Just keep in mind that the Hue Dimmer cannot report "Hold" event on buttons 1 (top) or 4 (top), even though selecting "Button Device" during a rule may auto-generate those events
Also, make sure to update the firmware Of the switch before adding it to Hubitat; otherwise, it tends to drop offline
I'm curious as to why we can't support hold events on 1 and 4. Before switching to hubitat I was using raspBee and it definitely reports those events. I was using the "press" events for local light on off, and "hold/release" events for turning the whole home or room on and off.
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I can only assume the same applies:
The Hue dimmers work so well when paired with the hue hub, I'd be very hesitant to pair them to HE instead. I have Pico remotes, connected to HE through a caseta pro hub, and I have hue dimmers paired to the hue hub which the HE connects to. I find the hue dimmers to be MUCH more responsive. Pushing a button on the hue dimmer gives affect the bulbs almost immediately, while with the Pico remote there is a significant delay before anything happens.
I have Hue Dimmers connected directly to Hue and a bunch of Picos I'm using on Hubitat to fake the same behavior. With the exception of the first Pico button press after a hub reboot (still not sure what's going on there...), I don't really notice much of a delay. If you're using the "regular" Pico driver instead of the "fast" Pico driver, that could be part of it--it delays a few hundred milliseconds (I forget the exact number) before sending the "pushed" event because it has to make sure you're not holding first. Otherwise, maybe it could be that "first time" issue a few of us have noticed?
Other than that, their behavior is excellent for me, and I've bought a ton of Picos but zero Hue Dimmers since. The Picos can give me the same functionality (plus, I'm sure, longer battery life) for half the price and can fit in a standard US wall plate. Other than that minor issue, I couldn't be happier with them. Could there be a problem with the way yours are configured?
Looking at the logs in Hubitat it seems like it shouldn't be possible. According to the logs it only shows the press event once, and doesn't show any other events.
One of the reasons to prefer the Hue over the Eria remotes for me was that the Eria used the hold function on "1" and "4" to reset and pair the device. I'll have to look at the code from my previous setup to see how it would have even been able to do it.
What shouldn't be possible? (I'm not clear on what "it" is.) You can see from an older but still-accurate-for-this-device button device matrix staff posted a while back that the Hue Dimmer should support just pushed on buttons 1 and 4 with pushed, held, and released on buttons 2 and 3. I forget what the Eria does but think it's similar (not sure if it can do all on buttons 1 and 4 or not).
If you mean doing different things for 1-5 pushes of button 1 like you can on the Hue app, that's not natively possible since the device does not send different messages for that, just the same for every press, so this is something Hue "fakes" with software trickery. You can recreate the same functionality on Hubitat with a carefully-written rule or third-party app (what I wrote Dimmer Button Controller for).
...but perhaps you're talking about something else.
