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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io

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What smart wall dimmers are you using? (waveform.social)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm looking for some good zigbee or thread wall dimmers for some hall lights, and I'd rather not use wifi if I can avoid it. The only thing I've been able to find on Amazon has been the Embrighten switches. Any suggestions?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I just ripped out my insteon system and replaced it with Caseta. I wanted the "device-to-device" response speed.

It doesn't work unless you want those MadKatz looking remotes on your wall. The two button remotes send all linked devices to full power, so I process them in Home Assistant. Home assistant is fast enough to process the commands, but the lutton protocol doesn't have any sort of acknowledgement on the wireless side, it just keeps on blasting for 1.4 seconds. Good for reliability, awful for latency.. So for 1.4 seconds after an action, the hub waits for the first device to stop transmitting before it sends commands to the rest of the devices.

I'm going to try some "scene" remotes and maybe get it to be acceptably quick but there are still limitations.

ZigBee is so good, they made thread. Z-wave is so good, there are 4 versions. Matter over thread is what I wanted but that's vaporware for now. Considering what I know now, I would probably have gone with esphome or tasmota dimmers. I was worried about them mucking up my wifi, but they're the only things I have on 2.4 and the scene controllers and garage controllers have been solid.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

This is good to know, I have a whole home Insteon setup now, will probably have to replace it at some point since they went under...

I replaced a few switches with a Zooz Z-Wave switch. It's fast enough but it's paired with ZigBee lights, so I have to use a #HomeAssistant automation to sync up the dimming. Not ideal so I didn't replace any more switches yet.