Hey all. Getting up to speed on my newish HS4 install, which includes a collection of stuff originally set up by our home automation guy. Bringing it all in-house, which means learning curve for me, but I've hit what is possibly a conceptual snag and I thought I'd throw myself at the mercy of the crowd.
We have a large room with eight RGBW bulbs in it, the Inovelli z-wave ones. Also there's an Inovelli Red dimmer switch intended to control them. We have them set up where the switch's load is always on and we're intending just to use the switch solely as a z-wave controller. Our initial test-the-waters plan was to have a "daylight" config, all lights cool white; a "candlelight" config, all lights warm white, and a "theater light" config, where most lights are off and two in the rear are at like 5%. So far I have the candlelight and theater configs set up and mostly working but I feel like I'm having to work too hard to make this fairly simple test config happen.
My current implementation has a tangle of nested events set up that get called when the switch gets tapped on, tapped off, or double-tapped on. So for instance, when I single-tap "on" I want the candlelight config, so I need the bulbs to (a) turn on, (b) set themselves to zero cool white and (c) 100% warm white. I have this implemented as a sequence of three events, each with eight actions, one for each bulb, for a total of 24 actions taking place just to turn on the lights. And as we might imagine, it takes a few seconds to go through all of that and the lights kinda cycle into the right config in an unsynchronized manner. So clearly I'm doing this the hard way, right?
My impression is that I should actually be able to do this with z-wave associations, so tapping the switch (as well as working the dimmer) just talks to the bulbs and makes the right thing happen, directly and quickly. But (a) it looks like I can only associate five bulbs with the switch? I haven't found any discussion of larger association groups anywhere, and (b) when I try to make the z-wave association in HomeSeer, the only entry available for the bulb in the association target pulldown ends up associating the switch with the cool white channel instead of the overall on/off channel. So while I feel like this is the simplest and most direct path to victory, I'm stumped in two ways.
And there's the notion of z-wave scenes, but I have read several places that this is a sorta deprecated concept, with events being the new hotness, so I haven't looked into that deeply yet.
So I guess my questions are:
* Am I misunderstanding associations somehow? Should this be able to be made to work with eight bulbs?
* Ae events really this fiddly and slow? I've seen people say that z-wave isn't super fast, but I feel like it's necessary to twiddle at least two or three commands, on each bulb, in order to get them into a deterministic state in response to an event. Do I really need 24 actions to turn on eight bulbs? (Aside: I've been tinkering with conditions for the events, checking if one of the bulbs is on before telling all eight to turn on, and that's helped the timing some but it still feels like a -lot- going on just to turn on the lights.)
* Or have I lead myself astray and I should be looking at z-wave scenes for this use case?
Thanks in advance for any guidance you can give me. I'm pretty sure I'm thinking about this wrong, at least some of it.
We have a large room with eight RGBW bulbs in it, the Inovelli z-wave ones. Also there's an Inovelli Red dimmer switch intended to control them. We have them set up where the switch's load is always on and we're intending just to use the switch solely as a z-wave controller. Our initial test-the-waters plan was to have a "daylight" config, all lights cool white; a "candlelight" config, all lights warm white, and a "theater light" config, where most lights are off and two in the rear are at like 5%. So far I have the candlelight and theater configs set up and mostly working but I feel like I'm having to work too hard to make this fairly simple test config happen.
My current implementation has a tangle of nested events set up that get called when the switch gets tapped on, tapped off, or double-tapped on. So for instance, when I single-tap "on" I want the candlelight config, so I need the bulbs to (a) turn on, (b) set themselves to zero cool white and (c) 100% warm white. I have this implemented as a sequence of three events, each with eight actions, one for each bulb, for a total of 24 actions taking place just to turn on the lights. And as we might imagine, it takes a few seconds to go through all of that and the lights kinda cycle into the right config in an unsynchronized manner. So clearly I'm doing this the hard way, right?
My impression is that I should actually be able to do this with z-wave associations, so tapping the switch (as well as working the dimmer) just talks to the bulbs and makes the right thing happen, directly and quickly. But (a) it looks like I can only associate five bulbs with the switch? I haven't found any discussion of larger association groups anywhere, and (b) when I try to make the z-wave association in HomeSeer, the only entry available for the bulb in the association target pulldown ends up associating the switch with the cool white channel instead of the overall on/off channel. So while I feel like this is the simplest and most direct path to victory, I'm stumped in two ways.
And there's the notion of z-wave scenes, but I have read several places that this is a sorta deprecated concept, with events being the new hotness, so I haven't looked into that deeply yet.
So I guess my questions are:
* Am I misunderstanding associations somehow? Should this be able to be made to work with eight bulbs?
* Ae events really this fiddly and slow? I've seen people say that z-wave isn't super fast, but I feel like it's necessary to twiddle at least two or three commands, on each bulb, in order to get them into a deterministic state in response to an event. Do I really need 24 actions to turn on eight bulbs? (Aside: I've been tinkering with conditions for the events, checking if one of the bulbs is on before telling all eight to turn on, and that's helped the timing some but it still feels like a -lot- going on just to turn on the lights.)
* Or have I lead myself astray and I should be looking at z-wave scenes for this use case?
Thanks in advance for any guidance you can give me. I'm pretty sure I'm thinking about this wrong, at least some of it.
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