Inovelli switch mentioned in this comparison

just saw this comparison and wanted to share it with y’all

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Danger Zooz!

Thanks for sharing @frcastellanos! We did stumble upon that the other day as well. Pretty good comparison. Of course we’re biased towards ours lol.

The one thing I will agree where Zooz has us is their compatibility with more light bulbs. Unfortunately this was a trade-off we had to make when designing the switch to work with both neutral and non-neutral, dumb or aux switch.

My understanding is that we chose MOSFET, leading edge due to the compatibility options allowed in a 3-Way situation, whereas TRIAC was unable to work with either a dumb switch or an aux switch.

Too bad that it’s a hardware dependency. A really awesome differentiating feature for Red Series would be to select leading-edge vs. trailing-edge dimming from a parameter.

The video also touched on another difference between various dimmers (though it didn’t highlight it specifically): dimming curves. When he noted (@ 05:52) that he couldn’t tell the difference between 75% and 100%, that sounds like a dimming curve issue: the perceived brightness does not always scale linearly with input power for all types of lights/drivers. (He also complained about the lights turning off around 35%, which means he didn’t setup parameter 5…) This does seem like something that could be done in firmware, and there’s even a Suggestions/Wishlist thread open for it. In some sense, we already do this: if parameters 5 and 6 are set to, say, 40% and 90% respectively, then the setLevel commands appear to be rescaled into the desired range. Presumably this is a linear interpolation, but this is where other functions could be used. (Interestingly, it seems that the interpolation is done with setLevel commands sent from the hub, but is not done when the level is set from a “default level” parameter/child device; but I should probably open a new thread about that one…)

That said, I’ve managed to solve most of my LED issues with a combination of minimum-level calibration and/or an Aeotec bypass.

Sounds like a new project for a dimmer that doesn’t work with a neutral but is compatible with a wider range of LEDs. Project The Whole Shebang. :grinning:

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Extra points for using a built-in light sensor to automatically calibrate the min and max levels and dimming curves. :grin:

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well, so far I’m happy with inovelli. regardless of his choice in the comparison. the only 3 points I’d like to be ironed out are local execution, z-wave OTA firmware upgrades (both in smartthings) and this occasional lag I experience from time to time (I blame cloud execution for that).

other than that, I’m really content with what you guys are doing and the passion you put into this. it’s like a family and I’m some way, I feel part of it :slight_smile:

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I feel it too; but that seems like Samsung’s problem rather than Inovelli’s, since they are who decides which drivers are “standard” and allowed local execution.

That’s SmartThings again. Their hub handles OTA updates for Zigbee devices, but not Z-Wave. That’s been an open request at SmartThings for almost three years. I have had reasonable success flashing the switches by adding a Z-Stick controlled by Silicon Labs “PC-Controller” software using the Secondary Controller method (which is slow, but avoids the exclude-reinclude-rebuild-all-the-automations cycle). Only occasionally do I need to flash a switch using the Z-Stick as a separate network.

So do I. And, honestly, this laginess (and also the unreliability of cloud execution) may drive me away from SmartThings faster than the unfriendly changes to the SmartThings platform that are coming down the pipe.

I’ve actually been trying to decide how I’m going to deal with the compatibility issue for an LED chandelier that I’ll be putting in as it doesn’t support MOSFET dimming. Since I don’t want to have multiple types of switches, my thinking is that I’m either going to get a micro-dimer, or just anther z-wave dimmer (that I can hide somewhere) which supports the alternative dimming technology, and then associate to the Red that is actually in the wall.

Perhaps Inovelli could look into producing a micro-dimmer product with alternative dimming tech to compliment the switches. Just an idea.