I only recently took the time to figure out how to do this in Home Assistant!
The favorite thing I’ve used it for so far is making the switch outside one of my bathrooms blink red when presence is detected in the bathroom. (Just the notification control!)
It’s helpful because folks have a habit of leaving the fan going when they leave, and it’s hard to tell if someone is actually in the bathroom or not. Blinking red means don’t go in. 
Pretty standard alarm notifications from above. Except I have a Red notification for when it’s “Evening or Night” mode on my hub and the alarm is not set.
I have several of the config buttons used as a toggle for a Child Escape Alarm. It flashes Green when the alarm is activated.
Also, because the kids like to play outside at various times, a switch near the backdoor becomes Yellow for when the UV Index is above a certain threshold and we need to put some sunscreen on.
I use my Red Series dimmers as light and fan controllers. Double-tap up or down to increase or decrease fan speed. Of course I cannot control the fans directly, I use my smart home hub to handle the fan control via a bond RF hub.
So, to the question, what do Inuse the notification leds for? When the fan speed is changed, I use the notification to confirm the fan speed change. Whether I change the speed via the dimmer or Alexa, the notification light changes color and animation effect to confirm the speed change.
My alarm variant: Scenario - 3 Story Townhome with attached garage.
Garage Light Switch -
2nd Floor Light Switch
‘On by detection/activity’ - Flash Blue
Other Users are similar to others:
So far, I only have one notification. Flashing yellow when the light is on a timer.
I’ve only just started the process of sorting this out, but every bedroom has a LZW36. So, my plan is to have weather notifications for the first few hours of the day. Top light color indicating chance of precipitation for the day and bottom light color indicating temperature.
From most to least useful:
Electric car not plugged in and low range after 8pm
Garage door open for 5+ min
Laundry ready
AC running with outside temp below indoor temp
AC running with sliding door open
I like the one for AC running when outside temp is lower than inside temp, but I live in central Texas, that rarely happens here.
I will say too, I usually avoid the color blue for my notifications because blue is the default color for the light level setting on the dimmer. I have had the power blink and the LED on the switch would be blue because nothing has triggered the light to change yet, such as the garage door being opened causing it to turn red.
I have a few LED notifications set up, always looking to add more in though. My favorites are:
High temperature led notification which changes between white, purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, red and pink based upon how hot or cold it is supposed to be that day as of 7 AM. Goes by 10s (mostly), so white is anything below 20 degrees F, pink is anything over 100 degrees F, red is 90 - 99 F, orange 80 - 89 F etc. Want to do a weather event notification at some point, but that might be confusing given the high temperature check…
Whenever I trigger an automation on a specific switch, the led bar first runs a yellow chase notification to indicate that an automation was successfully triggered. This is soon followed by either a solid 3 second green notification of automation success (all lights in house are now off), or 3 second fast blink red notification of automation failed (one light is being stubborn, I don’t know). I have some automations which can take a little bit to run and got tired of playing the game of “did I actually hit the button 3 times to call that automation”. Yellow chase helps a lot with that!
Real time window/door checker. If I want to double check the house is completely closed up I hit the config button on one switch. It’ll change all switches solid green for 3 seconds if the house is closed up, but fast blink red if anything is still open. Doesn’t work to tell me what’s actually open, but I can check HA for that easily enough. All switches will fast blink red if the HVAC turns on but something’s open as well.
If any homeassistant reboot call is detected, every single switch will play the blue (170) chase effect for 10 minutes (which should be plenty of time for the server to come back up). Once the server comes back online, a 3 second solid green notification clears the blue chase effect on all switches indicating the server is finally back online. Helps the rest of the house know if I’m working on the server and automations are currently not working.
Party trick notification, where my subflow sets all switches in the house to a random color/effect for 30 seconds. Really stupid automation most of the time, but a few visitors have got a kick out of it!
Oh, I am stealing at least three of these. Nice work!
What events are you using to detect automation trigger/success? This sounds super useful and I’d love to try setting it up myself.
I have all my automations set up in node red, and I use a subflow set up to detect scene events from particular node id’s on my network. I included a screenshot of one of my automations below.
I have a scene associated to the three up-press event on my entry way light 2 switch. Once this is detected, it launches both the “turn off kitchen cabinet led” automation, as well as setting the led bar on the same switch to a yellow chase animation.
From there I have a wait node, which I set to time out after 10 seconds if the condition it’s waiting for isn’t achieved. So if the kitchen leds turn off within 10 seconds, it plays a solid green effect for 3 seconds. If the wait node times out, it plays the red fast blink. Either way it clears the yellow chase notification successfully after no more than 10 seconds.
Here’s a picture of my automation:
It actually works quite well! It probably could be more efficient, but I like it none the less. I’m happy to share my code as well if interested. Hope this helps!
Ahh, node red. Not something I’ve delved into yet, but I think I get how that works. I was hoping you had found a way to respond to all automations starting and use the initiating entity ID to update the LED, rather than setting up the same logic for each individual switch.
Sorry to keep bugging you, but I tried to set this one up as well, only to find that by the time the shutdown trigger runs my automation, the zwavejs server is long gone, so nothing gets through to the switches. Is there anything special you did to get this to work?
Sorry for the delay on this one, I somehow missed the notification on my end.
This one is also in node red unfortunately, but I am monitoring call_service for a specific action of restart. So my switch node looks for msg.payload.event.service within call_service, and once it sees “restart” it triggers the led notification on my switches.
This automation sometimes fails to update all switches in time, but this usually does trigger in time before the server goes down for a reboot. I update my switches to a blue chase by calling a group, and I have noticed that the updates go out in the order they appear in the group. So if you have one switch in particular you hope to update, I’d make sure that’s listed first in your automation.
Hope this helps!
Ok, so you’re only capturing manual restarts, not anything outside of user action. But that’s probably good enough, thanks!
By the way, you might have better luck getting the message to all the switches if you use multicast. Bulk set isn’t quite as quick afaik. Check out this thread: Instant Notifications All Switches Using Multicast on HA - General Discussion - Inovelli Community
Correct, for my use case this was all I needed. And sure thing!
Also yes I have been very interested in phasing out bulk set in favor of multi cast, I’m hoping to have some extra time this weekend to work on that. Thanks for the heads up! I’ll take anything to speed up a few of my automations
I use alarms sent to every light switch for open garage door (red flashing) and any water leak sensor triggered (Blue flashing). I don’t like to overdo the alarms since I don’t want them to become something to ignore. The garage one has been very useful when someone forgets to close the door. Water leak I hope I never need to worry about.
I have a chase alarm on my garage light switch so when I hit the config button, it goes red indicates the automaton is turning off and green indicates turning on. I use this to toggle a light timer automaton (garage light turns on when garage door opens and turns off after 15 minutes). I hit the config button to turn off the automaton when I’m working in garage for longer than 15 minutes so the light doesn’t turn off on me. I also have the light timer set to dim transition for two minutes so I don’t get caught in the dark.
I change the LED default color based on my town’s garbage/recycle schedule which alternates weeks for recycling. Example, blue for no pickup/normal, yellow for cans (bin is yellow), green for paper and purple for garbage.
Using mine with Home Assistant. Tied together some automation to set the color for Weather statements, watches and warnings for my area from Environment Canada.
Blue = all clear
White = Weather Statement or Advisory
Yellow = Weather Watch
Red = Weather Warning
Gives us a visual alert for when storm warnings are issued or when there is bad weather happening.
