Brilliant Control - Claims It Will Work with SmartThings (But limited Integration)

Devices & Integrations Connected Things
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@gaurav_brilliant So basically the devices are worthless for controlling a room of lights. You can’t control multiple lights with your HUE integration and you can’t control multiple lights or rooms through your SmartThings integration.

How is this a smart switch again?

Your workarounds are ridiculous. Your own “scenes” can’t be controlled with gestures or the sliders. So this isn’t usable as a switch on the wall at all.

It’s also continuing to be misleading to say “we can control ‘devices’ or another switch.” So let me get this straight, I could possibly buy and install ANOTHER light SWITCH somewhere, get that to control a room or group of lights, and then map YOUR switch to control THAT switch.

Do you realize how crazy that is?

How did Brilliant launch a smart switch that through NONE of your integrations can control more than one light bulb at a time?

Massive oversight of monumental proportions. Update your advertising and your language used when describing before you get more unhappy people wasting a day of installation and frustration to find out your light switch can’t control lights.

You catching this @AdamHLG? We’ve got expensive junk so far. Workaround isn’t a workaround at all - does the same thing the HUE integration does. Controls ONE light bulb at a time. http://brilliant.tech.com/returns

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Thanks for the clarification, I found how to integrate with SmartThings. It is pretty obscure on your site (not listed in regular guides or integrations, so you could do a better job explaining that.)

With that said. I’m kind of left speechless. Like @Brett_Henrichsen. Wow. $1200 down the drain. I cannot comprehend you launched a product that can’t control a room or group of lights, not through SmartThings and not through HUE. How did this pass quality control? How is anyone over there at Brilliant saying with a straight face that you can control lights? You can’t. You can control one bulb.

And please don’t gloss it over with more misleading chatter and say you can possibly do it through Alexa. I have 7 Alexa devices in this room already. A Show, Echo, Ecobee and more. If I wanted to talk to Alexa to control the room lights, I can do that already. What I spent $1200 on was switches that advertise they can control lights. That’s plural, with an S. You can’t. You can control ONE LIGHT BULB.

Returning.

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Brett,

Candidly what I see here is Gaurav is trying to help and be responsive and your posts are way too aggressive.

As for the integration with SmartThings, may I respectfully suggest that you pause and catch your breath - I am only trying to help here as this gets sorted out. SmartThings allows you to create rooms. Gaurav is saying that Brilliant will not read the ‘rooms’ created by SmartThings. Neither does Alexa or Google - - they don’t read ‘rooms’ from SmartThings either. This is NOT what I am saying we should try. Rather, what I am saying is that in Hue, you can create a group. You do this first. Then, SmartThings will see that group as a single DEVICE within SmartThings (in addition to your individual bulbs). Brilliant then should see that group as a device as well. And you should then be able to control it. Case in point: in Alexa, I see my Hue group as a single device through the SmartThings integration. This has nothing to do with ‘rooms’. Brilliant should be no different in theory.

I am willing to help for the common good here but jeez let the poor guy from Brilliant respond after he talks to his team. Let him have that chance.

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@Brett_Henrichsen You can control a group of lights with a virtual leader switch. If you assign this switch to the Brilliant device you effectively have control over a room of lights. We currently do not expose groups/rooms as addressable objects via our APIs

http://thingsthataresmart.wiki/index.php?title=How_to_Group_Lights_Together

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Thanks Jody. And @AdamHLG I’m willing to give it a try with your suggestions before returning, although it is frustrating to have to find workarounds like this. HUE clearly and easily exposes it’s room and groups so why Brilliant can’t simply grab those too is a mystery.

@gaurav_brilliant another very elegant and seemingly simple solution - why don’t you just let your control GUI select more than one light when assigning actions to sliders? You list all the lights (bulbs) retrieved from HUE, so just let us multi-select them so we can select 4 lights at a time instead of de-selecting one when you select another. Or build your own “rooms” into your GUI. A variety of ways exist to elegantly handle yourself or with HUE API without requiring the SmartThings workaround.

@jody.albritton - the problem I have now is that I can’t get SmartThings to see HUE at all. I’ve followed all of the troubleshooting steps here:

I’ve restarted and reset both the SmartThings hub and the HUE hub, I’ve also restarted the router. I’ve done all of this 3 or 4 times now in different orders. The HUE and SmartThings hub are connected to the same switch/router right next to each other. But every time I hit ADD THING and then “add device manually” and then select a HUE bulb, it just goes into it’s loop of “looking for devices” - it never asks me to press the button on the HUE hub and it never returns any HUE hubs.

So how can I do this workaround if I can’t get SmartThings to see HUE?

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Hmmm. I am using the “Hue Advanced (Connect)” SmartApp (Hue Advanced (Connect)) in my implementation and that SmartApp found my Hue controller. Maybe try that.

A few posts up Jody also talks about another way to implement a Hue group in SmartThings that would show up as a single device in SmartThings. His way does not require setting up a group in Hue first. I would try his way first - he is a software engineer - I am not :–)

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Did you have your bridge connected before and disconnect it?

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Hi @jody.albritton , sorry, not quite sure what “did you have your bridge connected before and disconnect it?” means. Are you referring to HUE or SmartThings and which before?

To explain again… yes, I already had an existing HUE bridge/hub, this system in place and working great for years. Purchased Brilliant switches, learned they cannot control a room of lights as advertised, now need SmartThings as a workaround.

Bought SmartThings hub, plugged in, added it with the SmartThings Classic app (new app doesn’t see anything). The SmartThings app sees Sonos speakers and a room of GE lights. It does not see ANY Hue lights.

I follow all of the instructions in links posted above to “manually add device” then “manually add device” again and I go and select a HUE light bulb from list.

Smart Things app goes back to “searching for devices”. It NEVER gives prompt (per all your instructions that it should) to “press button on HUE” and it never finds the HUE hub or any of it’s lights.

I then have followed all the instructions in troubleshooting (link above) (a) reset your hub and disconnect and reconnect (b) reset HUE hub and disconnect and reconnect and © restart router.

I’ve tried all of those things in every order possible, about 10 times now.

in no case after any of the above does your SmartThings APP EVER prompt to push the button on HUE hub nor does it ever find the hub or any bulbs.

So I’m at a loss. I’d love to hear exactly the order you want me to try with HUE, SmartThings hub, APP.

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Just out of curiosity, I went to their website – where do they advertise they can control a room of lights through Hue Groups? Only thing I see is “intelligently control your lights including Hue.” Above the brilliant rep said they are working on the integration that you want and will have an announcement soon about when it’s available. Instead of freaking out and maybe driving away a rep from the company who didn’t need to come on here and is only trying to help…why not take a second to collect and gather. Their product has about 15 integration partners. I would assume they weren’t able to go as deep as they would like on every single feature for their launch which looks like it was recent. I would assume if it’s a start up, they don’t have 40 engineers on each problem like google or samsung and probably have a bunch of different improvements they need to work on.

I am interested in buying Brilliant (don’t have Hue) and only will do so when I can read more reviews and understand their Sonos integration more. I would buy it for Sonos, August Lock and Ring. Maybe the video intercom so I can yell at the kids to come to dinner. Personally, I would find it helpful if their rep stayed on here and we had nice interactions as they don’t have their own forum. Over the years, when i’ve read forums like these, when people flamed rep companies, the reps just disappear and don’t engage. It’s not like they need to be talking to us. And on top of that I found this forum for searching for more information about brilliant and they haven’t hopped on any other page except product hunt thus far.

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For us and others interested in Brilliant, its that they lead you to believe they control a room of lights. Let’s remember what they are going after and the form factor for a minute - they are a LIGHT SWITCH form factor. That means most people buying Brilliant are looking for it to replace light switches in the wall as the primary function. And light switches in the wall control lights, not one light bulb. So it’s a common assumption that when they advertise they control lights, and that they have HUE integration, that they are going to control a room of HUE lights and not one HUE light bulb.

Yes, all the other integrations are amazing, but I’m really curious why anyone is buying a light switch form factor device for it’s Alexa or Sonos integration? There are a million other (cheaper, and better) Alexa devices - you can put a Dot, Echo or Show anywhere in your room for cheap and do what the Brilliant Alexa integration does. All the Sonos integration does is let you turn the volume up and down on the speakers in that room - that’s it. Again, a million other Sonos integrations, including Alexa, allow you to do a lot more with Sonos.

So, the frustration is, you’re buying a light switch for it’s primary purpose to control lights and it doesn’t do it. That’s a big deal. If you really want a $400 light switch to turn Sonos up and down, well, great, it does that, it seems.

So far, can’t even get the workaround through SmartThing working, @jody.albritton doesn’t seem to have any ideas other than a vague question about one thing being installed before the other and hasn’t provided clarification. We’d love to give Brilliant a chance, they look nice. But they don’t control lights - in our opinion they should clarify that because saying they control lights and have HUE integration is very misleading with what they actually do right now.

Baffled that devices as far along as SmartThings and HUE are not seeing each other and no one from SmarThings has ideas other than the vague and old troubleshooting doc that doesn’t resolve anything. We spent 9 hours resetting HUE and SmartThings bridges and hubs and router over and over in different orders and SmartThings still refuses to see the HUE bridge or lights.

Brilliant has several ways they can save their switch quickly - fix their API call to HUE and return a list of rooms or groups, or simply allow there built in GUI to select more than one light bulb when assigning to a switch/slider, and then they would be able to control more than one light. Either shouldn’t be too difficult. Any news on this @gaurav_brilliant?

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I read a review on another forum that you can control Sonos favorites. Not sure yet but mine is to be delivered by Friday so I will install over the weekend and report back.

Not sure what your issue is with SmartThings and Hue but my SmartThings hub works flawlessly with my Hue hub.

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Works awesome with Sonos. Shows all of your favorites including icons and cover art on the music control screen.

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They can control a room of lights. All of the lights put in a Brilliant room can be controlled with the 2-finger swipe. They go over this in their on screen tutorial. You could put all of your Hue bulbs in a room and control all of them with a 2-finger swipe. I do this in my bedroom. You can also control a room or house of light through the GUI. I don’t see any blatant false advertising. In fact I just ordered two more switches.

Let’s be specific about what your (valid) complaint is. You want to control a group of Hue bulbs as a single light. This is a part of the Hue API and hopefully they add this soon.

A lot of us here have been through many ups and downs of home automation over a very long period of time (look at the join dates of people on this forum). Many of us have been burned by many HA startups so we are not a bunch of softies or Brilliant fanboys. Brilliant delivered a strong introductory piece of hardware with some software kinks and gaps that still need to be worked out. This is common among compinies like Apple, Google, and Amazon too. This is hardly an unfinished product. If you look at my detailed review above, there is a lot of room for growth, but by and large it is off to a great start.

While we may not all agree on the status of the product, we should all agree that rants at @gaurav_brilliant are totally unproductive. To be frank, if people who are ranting at him don’t pump the brakes, you are going to scare him off the forum. Then while you may have had a cathartic release, we’ll all have no input in the future direction of the product.

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I completely agree with swamplynx and could not have said it better myself (with regard to the part about scaring away the rep). Once I receive the product and install it, I will add feedback on the integration and technical issues.

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I would love to hear how to get the SmartThings bridge to see the HUE bridge. It just won’t see it, we’ve tried everything.

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Can you explain exactly how to get the Brilliant to control a room full of HUE lights without SmartThings? I’ve gone over their instructions and played with the GUI over and over.

Here’s how you’re supposed to do it - you go to SETTINGS - GESTURES, then you can assign a room to the slider/gesture. Once you select the room, it then asks you to choose a DEVICE (one device), so I can only choose one light bulb. Selecting another light bulb deactiavates the previous one.

YES - they show that you can add more than one light to a room, but when it comes time to assign a slider or gesture to a room, it then wants you to not only select a room, but also select ONE device in that room.

Are you using Brilliant personally to control a room of HUE lights without SmartThings, if so, please tell us how, and you will be the savior.

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Please see attached photos of the GUI interface we see when trying to assign lights/room to a slider on Brilliant. It just updated last night, so it’s on latest update.

Screen one asks you to choose a room, then a device, then when you select device, you are only able to select one light bulb. If you select another light bulb, the previously selected light bulb deselects.

Where do you see in the GUI that you can assign a room of HUE lights, or assign a group of lights to a room, natively in Brilliant. I would love to find out that we are missing something, but this is what we see, and it follows their guides.

brilliant1
brilliant1.jpg3024×4032 1.97 MB
brilliant2
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Also, in case you don’t have the switches with sliders and just have the one gang switches, here is the gesture control screen that would control the gestures. Just like above, for sliders, you can only choose one device, not a room. See “swipes on this screen control” and then a list? Hitting the list asks you to choose ONE device, not a room, and you can only choose one, not multiple, so the gesture can only control one light bulb. How/where are you seeing the ability to select a room of lights natively?

brilliant3
brilliant3.jpg3024×4032 2.18 MB

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The sliders can only control one device. But every device in the same room as the Brilliant can be controlled by the two-fingers on the screen gesture.

Obviously not ideal since you can’t use a slider or one finger, but works.

I have two Hue’s in my bedroom. The one finger gesture operates whatever light I have it set to in settings. The two fingers on the screen operate both since I have the Brilliant and both bulbs assigned to the same room.

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@swamplynx See my last note on the gestures. How do I control all the devices in the same room with the two finger gesture as you suggest can be done? When I go to assign gestures, it also asks me to choose one device in the room.

Sorry, but back to the original complaint of a $400 light switch with these amazing sliders that can only control one light bulb. The reason we bought switches with sliders was to control rooms of lights.