Possible to use Zooz ZEN21 LED as indicator? (Zwave setting by RM?)

So I have a ZEN21 in my laundry room that controls the lights, it’s right next to a door that leads out to the garage. ALL the time I have to check if garage is open or closed by walking through the room, opening the door and looking.

It got me thinking: is there some way via Rule Machine to say “when door opens (SmartThings Mulitisensor goes to “on”), turn that zwave setting for the light on the ZEN21 to be “always on” and when the door shuts (ST goes to “off”), set the light to “always off”

This would save me a lot of time as I could just look at the switch from my kitchen to see garage door status

Thanks I’m advance

To note: I also have Home Assistant and Node-Red in my system but since the ZEN21 is paired to my Hubitat, I assume RM is path of least resistance to accomplish this task

I don’t think so but @jtp10181will be able to tell you for sure. I am using his drivers for all my Zooz switches.

I think I read that the new zen7x switches can but I’m not sure. I have a few but haven’t installed them yet.

Also the inovelli red series has the capability.

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It is conceivable it could be done with the Zen21. You would have to change parameter #2. It would probably require a special driver version to expose this parameter as a command, unless RM has a way to send a Z-wave command like is available in the Advanced device edit screen.

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Yes I have done this already with the ZEN7x switches and the COLOR of the LED. I could also add a new command to change the LED on/off parameter since the older switches don't have a multi-color LED. I see if I can make a version for you to test this week some time.

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Awesome! This would be amazing

I have a question. If this involves updating the configuration eeprom on the device, how many write operations are they rated for. Some internal eeprom is only rated for 10k writes. If the notification got triggered on and off 10 times a day, that could be 7k writes in a year. Just thinking out loud.

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I have a question. If this involves updating the configuration eeprom on the device, how many write operations are they rated for. Some internal eeprom is only rated for 10k writes. If the notification got triggered on and off 10 times a day, that could be 7k writes in a year. Just thinking out loud.

@agnes.zooz Any thoughts on this? Or is there any way we can change the LED (on older switches or ZEN7x series) via another command besides changing the parameter?

Any reason you're not using a Z-Wave sensor to monitor the garage door and send you a notification to your phone when it's open when it's not supposed to be? This way you wouldn't need to be in any particular room to know the status of the door as long as you have your phone around...

Honestly, no idea here! :sweat_smile: But I'll try to find out. There's no way to control the LED indicator in automations on the older switches.

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I just want to be able to glance at this location and see “open or shut”…. How long and when are zero factors

my Plan B is to use a 12v LED and a Shelly1, but as I was kind of formulating to do that I thought “hey, there is an LED right here already that would fulfill my need, as long as it’s possible”

There will be if I add a command in the driver to change the parameter (can then set to always on or always off to use as an indicator light). But the question was would changing parameters frequently wear out the eeprom memory chip too quickly?

@morningz Do you have any Alexa or Google type voice control devices nearby? I have my tilt sensor on the garage door exposed to Alexa and I can ask if it is open and she will reply with the status (open or closed). I only exposed the sensor on purpose so you cannot control it via voice. Just another thought.

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I just now bought a 7 series…. I had a need for a simple Z wave switch somewhere else so I’ll just move stuff around and all will work how I want!

Thanks to all, the custom driver will do exactly what I want to accomplish

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I'm still verifying this with the engineers. How often are we talking here at a maximum, 10, 20 times a day?

Yeah I cant imagine much more than that. Possible uses would be an indicator for a garage door or other door sensor, or also alarm armed / unarmed status.


If its going to be an issue with too many writes to the parameters then it would be awesome if we could send a command to the switch to adjust the LED without changing the actual parameter. I am thinking the parameter would then become the default but it could be adjusted on the fly using a command. I know there are other switches that do this but I have not looked into how they do it exactly.

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FWIW, Inovelli's LED "notification" feature is also just a Z-Wave parameter (and a large one at that, 4 bytes).

Not sure if that's clear from the above discussion so I thought I'd clarify this if anyone is researching this in the future: Z-Wave now support the LED Indicator command class that allows you to treat the LED indicator as a separate device you can control so that's why we're having this conversation about the older Zooz switches (vs the new 700 devices that already support this new LED Indicator command class).

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I was able to verify that the Z-Wave chip can handle well over 100K of these changes so no real-life limit here really :slight_smile: Hope that helps!

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Ok great then I will probably add that command in a future version.
Also, I have not yet figured out how to use the Indicator commands to change the LED on the 700 switches, I am doing it with the parameter. If you have any tips let me know. Otherwise I will just have to do some research on it myself eventually.

@morningz
I have added a command in version 1.4.3 to change the LED on/off status so that it can be set in a rule. You will see the command in the UI when you use the driver.

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Hi @agnes.zooz,
I have the Zooz ZEN77 dimmer switches. I would like to use the LED notification to show status of a door open. Can you confirm if the best way to do this is to use bulk_set_partial_config_parameters? I would set parameter 23 to "3" if the door is open (red) or back to "1" if closed (blue).
I just want to make sure there isn't another way to change the LED color. Based on what I was reading, it seems this might cause a write to the EEPROM every time I change this parameter. I would prefer not to wear out the EEPROM if there is another option.

Thanks!
Robert

Yes, changing the LED indicator color setting would be the way to go here.

You don't need to worry about changing the parameters on these - there isn't a limit on the amount of changes the device can handle here and it won't affect the operation or memory of the switch. We already verified that with the engineers.

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