FLS-PP lp a ZigBee Light Link Wireless Ballast for LED Stripes

Devices & Integrations
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Hi, here’s an update on the separate white channel control topic. First things first, it works with the Philips hue bridge now! I’ve made a short demo video so you can see how it works with a 24V RGBW light strip. https://vimeo.com/129316684
Please bare with my old HTC phone for sluggish fading, actually it’s pretty smooth with a proper mobile device.

So what changed?

Before

  • RGB and white channel was controlled by one Extended Color Light
  • User experience works only well for RGB not for RGBW
  • As tradeoff white channel was set implicitly based on saturation and brightness
  • No way to manually adjust the white channel

After

  • RGB channels are still controlled as usual by the Extended Color Light
  • The white channel is no longer controlled implicitly with RGB channels
  • The white channel is represented as separated Dimmable Light (like a Philips hue Lux)
  • Therefore full control of white channel as well as full brightness range is available

What do you think? In my opinion the UI control widgets must reflect the new behavior so that one can see the RGB and white channel controls on one screen. I guess for SmartThings and some 3rd party apps this will be pretty easy to implement but I’m afraid the Philips hue app won’t provide such a widget.

When will the update be available?

Beside the white channel control the firmware update provides several improvements and bug fixes. We are currently in the last stages to verify everything is rock solid so that we can bring the update to ZigBee certification in June/July. After certification we will provide the .zigbee OTA update file to update devices which are already in the field. Here is the biggest challenge, as I mentioned before to update the FLS-PP lp the gateway must support ZigBee ZCL standard OTA which SmartThings currently doesn’t (as to my knowledge). So for now another device would be needed for updating. The RaspBee Shield and our ZigBee dongle will work for sure, also there are further ZigBee dongles which may work but I had never tested them. I’m happy to help writing a SmartThings driver for updating if that is possible with the public ST API?

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