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

Devices & Integrations Connected Things
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Well said, Benji… Well said.

There’s no value in being an early adopter. Prices are not lower than what they will eventually be once production ramps up and mass-market scaling occurs (or the business fails and they don’t sell anything anyway). Even if you don’t cut get by the edge … bumps and bruises are inevitable.

There is no strong correlation between “the latest” of anything vs its quality, stability, and value. Nifty features? Sure! Free Beta? Sometimes… but, of course, at greater risk of stability and incompleteness.

That’s why Kickstarter and IndieGogo are really, really inadvisable unless you have plenty of money and time to risk; and/or are a particularly generous person.

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Sorry guys, I’m siding with the critic Brett on this one. I’ve been watching the Brilliant announcement since day one (January I believe?), I’ve read the reviews (that read like advertisements almost - on Engadget, Verve, all over. And then I go take a look at their website and what they advertise they do. And I ordered some switches…

And now I’ve come to the same realization as Brett - they misled us. I agree with you and Benji that being an early adopter can be rough. But @gaurav_brilliant Brilliant shouldn’t be misleading us like they are that, this is a SWITCH. Tgauchat, this isn’t a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign, this is an up and running website shipping final product with misleading advertising that they don’t tell you anywhere doesn’t do the basic function they advertise that they do - control lights.

While all these other integrations (Sonos, eventual SmartThings, Alexa, etc) are nice and cool, let’s all remember (and Brilliant and @gaurav_brilliant please take note) - there are 7 million devices out there that integrate with Alexa and SmarThings etc - we can control lights with our phone, our iPad, apps, Echo, Show, Alexa, voice - a million ways and with a million things. But, here’s the novel concept you’re (Brilliant) is missing - people are buying this thing for ONE MAIN REASON- it’s LIGHT SWITCH FORM FACTOR. If we wanted to control our lights with Alexa, we have Echo, Ecobee Switch, etc. If we wanted to control our lights with SmartThings, well, SmartThings ALREADY DOES THAT. So, what we want to be able to control our lights (notice lights, not one light bulb) with - is a SWITCH.

Bottom line there are still people - visitors, kids, grandma, etc who come by and walk into a room and need to be able to turn our smart lights on and off. They don’t know how to talk to Alexa or want to get out a phone. They want to touch a light switch. And that is why people are buying Brilliant. I can get Alexa, Sonos and Smartthings integrations in Echo show, my iPad and other devices. What I need Brilliant for is to control LIGHTS. The rest is gravy. But they just served me a plate of cold gravy with no potatoes.

So that is why people want and buy things like Wink Relay, the ill fated Plum, and now Brilliant - because you are advertising (and reviewers are misleading us) by saying you control LIGHTS. But we’ve now found, and you’ve admitted above, that you don’t. You can control ONE LIGHT BULB. This isn’t early adopting technology. I’d let you get away with that 3 or 4 years ago - yes, it might have been tough then. But this is 2018 - many have come before. Many control LIGHTS and ROOMS now. You can’t launch a smart LIGHT SWITCH product that doesn’t control LIGHTS.

And I appreciate @AdamHLG optimism and desires for workarounds, but again, it sounds like SmartThings integration is further off than Hue, it’s a workaround, and why should you buy a $399 light switch that is supposed to control LIGHTS and now have to figure out how to make it trigger other things as a workaround that they should have built in? And is the SmartThings trigger going to allow dimming, rooms, groups, etc?

How can Alexa, Ecobee, and many other simple App Store apps that connect to HUE’s API see rooms and groups and this $399 light switch that advertises it has HUE integration can’t?

Returning our 4 switches as well, frustratingly, unless an update is pushed this week that fixes this shortcoming.

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I think we’ve made the point. I hope we receive an acceptable response from @gaurav_brilliant.

One note: As I understand it, Brilliant can control SmartThings now. The future upgrade will allow SmartThings to control loads attached to Brilliant. I am assuming for my - temporary - work around that the existing integration with SmartThings will allow me to turn on, turn off, and dim a Hue group. Once I receive my 2 switch Brilliant, I will test this out.

The website says 30 days for returns. This should be a simple fix for full Hue integration. I hope the vendor is listening as I do agree this is a serious bug. And candidly I am not buying the excuse that SmartThings will have an API change as far as not yet programming the ability to control loads attached to the Brilliant. If the API changes down the road, fix it then.

I guess at this point I will see what happens. Brilliant - I am advocating for you here - don’t let me down!!!

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You don’t allow us to control lightS. You only allow us to control ONE light BULB. The only way to control a room of lights is by using the switch load on/off, which a regular light switch does. I just spent $1200 on worthless switches? Please Brilliant, stop misleading people, in your advertising and in your response above you keep saying you control “lights” - you don’t. You are leaving out very important small print.

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Sorry Adam, no, there is no SmartThings integration now. The only integration is Alexa. This entire thread is based on the “COMING” integration of SmartThings. They don’t have it now. Trust me, I just went over to one of my 4 installed switches and tried integrations. There is only Alexa. I already have 4 Echos, 2 Shows, and 3 Dots. I don’t need another Alexa integration, I need a light switch that controls lights.

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Get your box and receipt ready. The odds of any vendor fixing an issue of this scope within a week are exceeding low.

As to whether or not this is “false advertising”… Consumer protection laws vary for cases like this. Most likely the Terms of Service you agreed to by installing the units disclaims all but the most basic of warranties, and if you disagree with those limited warranty Terms, you can reject them by returning the product within the normal return window.

Not saying that you don’t have a good reason to be frustrated; just saying that “glitches” like this are completely common in this industry - the more complex the product, the more likely some occur. Some such glitches or missing features never get fixed - as we’re well aware of by being SmartThings customers for years. Other issues are resolved incredibly quickly.

Maybe you won’t need that return box… :crossed_fingers:.

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Well I am definitely confused on SmartThings integration. I was under the assumption that Brilliant can control SmartThings but not vice versa. I just received this response from technical support at Brilliant when I asked if there was direct integration with Lutron Caseta:

[name deleted] (Brilliant)

Oct 29, 5:06 AM PDT

Hi,

Thank you for your question!

We are working with Lutron to figure out the best way to directly integrate, but for now, the way we connect with Caseta is through hubs like SmartThings. Once you connect through a hub, you can access the light from the Brilliant Control, add those lights to custom scenes, and more.

You can see a list of compatible devices here and fill out a form to suggest new ones!

[name deleted]

So what gives? This response suggests Brilliant currently can control devices through SmartThings.

I guess I will test myself when my units arrive.

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Hi Adam,

You are correct. Brilliant can control SmartThings devices as listed here.

We currently support controlling Lights and Locks that you have connected to your SmartThings Hub.

Once you get your Brilliant Smart Home Control, tap on “Home” and visit a room. There you will see “Add Devices”, which will allow you to connect your SmartThings account and add the devices you would like.

I will reply back to this thread after discussing with our team re: timing on allowing ST to control Brilliant and Hue Groups.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

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Hey all, I had to do some digging in the help articles as well to finally find how Brilliant talks to SmartThings, as it’s not listed in the integrations tab. It looks like you have to go to SmartThings app or on web, then find Brilliant, add it, then go back to Brilliant to add devices again. So I can see why @tracyghurst couldn’t find it.

I don’t have SmartThings (was a Wink user instead). While I can’t believe I have to buy another $80 device and hub to do what Brilliant is supposed to do out of the box, I just ordered a SmartThings hub via Amazon Prime now and it will be here in 2 hours, then I will test the above.

BUT - @gaurav_brilliant - here’s the catch - and I fear you are conveniently glossing over it in your statement again - you say once added Brilliant can control SmartThings LIGHTS/DEVICES. BUT - can you control SmartThings rooms/groups? If you are only going to see SmartThings lights/devices INDIVDUALLY, which I can already predict is the case based on your wording and your other poor HUE implementation, then we are no further along. If I can only control ONE light via SmartThings integration and not see rooms and groups, then this is no workaround at all. Please tell me I"m wrong before the hub shows up in 2 hours and I find out myself…

And, if suspected, you only can see DEVICES (individual light bulbs), and you know this, why are you not just coming out and saying above - well, we can see SmartThings devices but not rooms/groups so this workaround isn’t going to work either. Why keep misleading us?

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Hi Brett,

At this moment, Brilliant can control SmartThings Lights and Locks. No, we do not yet have support for rooms/groups from SmartThings.

We apologize for any confusion while navigating our support articles, we are continuing to update this with feedback from our users. Here is an accurate description of how we work with SmartThings.

We do allow you to control multiple devices through our home automation, or Scenes. Our sliders currently can be mapped to individual lights and switches, or to Sonos music volume on a device or group.

Please bear with me as I work with our team after the weekend’s responses on this thread to give better responses re: SmartThings and Hue Control feature requests.

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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?