Some Zigbee bulbs, for example the ones from IKEA, have certain properties under the Preferences tab that are not present for Generic bulbs.
Examples: "Power On Behavior" and "Turn On Behavior". (screenshot below).
Are these properties in the firmware of the bulb itself, or is this something that has been added through functionality in Hubitat?
I am asking because an absolute killer feature would be to have a "opposite state" option for the Power On setting.
Allow me to explain. Most older "Smart Home" systems that are part of the electrical installation generally don't play nice with newer stuff like Zigbee and Z-Wave. We have such a system from Schneider Electric (does essentially the same as systems from Siemens or whatnot). The Distribution board has a DIM mounted PLC-style computer. Most outlets and plugs in the house are connected to relays that can be programmatically assigned to whatever buttons and functions we want - but only within the constraints of the PLC system, which has no documented external API. It's obviously very stable, but also very outdated. Replacing it costs a fortune.
At least 400.000 households in Denmark alone has such a system. I assume there are millions of them out there, from various vendors.
When we turn off a bulb with this system, the power is cut. This prevents us from controlling it with newer automation platforms like Hubitat. But this could be fixed if the old platform never actually cut the power permanently. We could program it to cut power for 500 ms. and then restoring it, thereby leaving the bulb always powered. If the bulb always selected the opposite of its previous state, we would have a way of controlling all bulbs with the old platform, while keeping all devices powered and ready for additional commands over Zigbee.
So, getting back to Hubitat: does anyone know if these states are part of the firmware of controlled in Hubitat? What would it take to implement an option for "Opposite of last state"?
Share your thoughts. Hundreds of thousands of owners of old automation platforms could benefit.
You could manage/implement this using a virtual switch device and a rule to change the virtual state to the opposite of the actual device state, or use the mirror me app, Create Custom Mirror, which allows such mappings directly.
Yes, I could do that. I am a geek at heart, so perhaps I'll go with that. Thanks; much appreciated!
But it will also result in having a virtual switch and a rule (or a mirror) for every single bulb in the household. So that's a lot of work, and a lot of rules/lines in Hubitat.
Do you know if the Power On property is part of the bulb firmware, or maintained by something in Hubitat? If it's in the firmware, the solution could be used by any smarthome ecosystem. There are custom firmwares out there, though it seems to be mostly Espressif products.
On the other side, reaching out to a community driver developer in the Hubitat forums is easier than cooking a firmware.
The optimal solution would be to set the "Opposite of last state" option on the bulb itself. Either as a property in the hardware, or using a feature in the Hubitat driver.
The power on behavior is part of the IKEA bulbs firmware. The good news is that the Zigbee specification already contains the scenario you are looking for, and I believe that IKEA also implemented it in the firmware (with very few exceptions, IKEA did an excellent job in staying true to the Zigbee specs).
I did not include this option in the drivers cause I did not see a use case for it. I'll test and add it when I get a bit of free time.
I kid you not when I say: this could be almost a miracle for millions of first-gen "smart"home owners.
It could also be a significant sales boost for Hubitat. If this was easy to use and implement with Hubitat, but not with competing systems (because they don't let users set the option easily), it could move quite a few units.
If you get this working, I think you and the Hubitat devs should do a video on it, and post it in the official channel. I know it sounds odd, but this capability is really "the missing link" between a lot of oldschool smarthome systems, and modern Zigbee systems.
