Trying to Understand RGBGenie Devices but I'm lost

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1

I have an RGBGenie RGBWW controller as well as one of their touch panels (both zwave). In general, they work great. I have an association setup between them and if I press the touch panel everything works instantly and great.

Recently though I tried automating some of these controllers/light strips for my home theater. Now I'm hitting some issues and need help.

So I have it setup where if the theater starts playing, turn on the RGBWW and set it to a specific color. Works great. Lights turn on and set the color. But what I noticed is if I then go over to the touch panel and press the off button, they don't turn off. I have to press it twice. Why? Because the touch panel doesn't know the strip was ever turned on. It still has switch: off as it's state. I thought the solution would be simple, instead of sending the on/off commands to the RGBWW controller directly, instead send it to the touch panel. Unfortunately this does nothing except log Command on is not implemented on Theater Accent Lights Controller so that won't work. Does anyone use these devices and know how to keep them in sync when automating?

I tried to see if there were settings or commands that could help but there's no documentation for these drivers that I can find. Like what is "bundle attributes" command?

Does anyone have these successfully working for automations?

I'm using the builtin drivers that I believe @mike.maxwell wrote. Are there community drivers that work better?

Edit: Hmm, the more I play the more I suspect there are either bugs in the firmware or the driver for these devices. I've now had several times where I updated the color of the controller via .setColor this works and the device changes color. However, the state reports in the driver still reports the old color. Haven't found a pattern yet but I reproduced it 10+ times now.

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This seems to be the case for the Zigbee touch panels. And driver issues to match the firmware flaws. These touch panels just don't work like I expect them to. Certain buttons don't do anything, they do different things than are printed on the face, and are just generally buggy. It wouldn't surprise me that the Zwave version also has issues.

The controllers seem to work OK, but for the price the Gledopto ones seem to work faster/better at a fraction of the price.

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Hmm I haven't had this problem with the zwave ones. All the buttons work as expected and do what the manual says they should. My only criticism of the panel itself is it gives you no feedback at all when a touch is detected which is rather annoying.

Unfortunately I can't find anyone else who makes a touch panel like this? If these turn out to be junk I'd switch, but I can't find anything similar.

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I think they are the only ones like this. I wish there were other choices, and with the proliferation of LED strips and color bulbs I don't understand why nobody else has tried to make something similar. I like the concept of this color mixing button, but these particular devices in my opinion are looks over functionality.

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Probably right, but my wife liked them so she can play with the color settings and it convinced her that me buying all these RGB lights was OK, so that alone made it worth it :slight_smile:

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6

You are a genius! My wife wants everything to operate and look the same as it would, with dimmers that act like regular dimmers when she needs to override an automation, but otherwise follow the warm to cool to warm circadian lighting, but not as warm white when turning up the brightness at night. Integrating Apple’s Adaptive Lighting and adding Zen dimmers finally made her happy with all the Hue and Sylvania lights.