I my ST Hub V2 over this past weekend. I had been using Vera Lite successfully for the last year. I have three VRCS4-M0Z controllers that I was able to program with the Vera Lite. I have installed the new device type and the Smart App by @bdahlem available in the Smartthings Community forum under the “Leviton VRCS4” post. They seem to be working only, somewhat. I created four “routines” in the mobile app, and assigned those to the four buttons on the controller. They show up under “Activate these phrases” as “Hello Home Actions.”
My issue is that this controller worked a little differently with Vera Lite. Each button over there was designed to do two things. If you pressed it, it would send send a scene command and light up green (it would stay lit), but when you pressed it again, it would send a different scene command (and no longer be lit). That second scene command was set up in my system as “turn the lights off”. So first press would turn the lights on (with green light turining on), and the second would turn the lights off (with green light going off). Programming this was accomplished with simple drop down menus in Vera Lite: choose the “on scene,” and then choose the “off scene.” Can we do anything similar over here? Also, The dimmer switch at the bottom of the controller worked naturally over there. It would control the light levels for the last button that you pushed. Has anyone gotten something like that to work?
This functionality is a very important part of my home. My wife would never use the app. Those buttons on the wall are the only way that she can turn lights on and off. This really needs to be addressed, and there doesn’t seem to be any reason why ST can’t do it just like Vera.
HI @tbox, I have seen a video and in vera works a little different, my device type makes this
Press button 1 - button 1 pushed led on
Press button 1 - Button 1 released led off
Hold button 1 - Button 1 (no event) led blinked
Press button 1 - button 1 hold released
when button 1 led is on , I can select the up and down buttons
when button 1 led on, push Up - button up 1 pressed
when button 1 led on, push Down - button down 1 pressed
when button 1 led on, press any other button to tun off selected.
I use this with dimmer lamps, but is great to music selector.
example.
Button 1 pressed (is to select speaker 1)
Button up and down control the volume
button 1 pressed again , release the led and play/stop toggle
If I don´t want to toggle i just select other button and the led tun of to deselect the button 1
button 1 hold and after blink pressed again to stop all speakers
.
.
.
I think you got the idea.
Is anyone still interested in this? Last night I wrote a device handler for these devices, but I didn’t want it to act as a scene controller. I wanted it to work like a bunch of push buttons that could then be used with CoRE.
As I coded it, when you press a button the LED on that button lights up until the hub accepts the command and then goes out. So I have an off button that turns off all the lights in the room, and the other three are on buttons that trigger various CoRE pistons to set up scenes.
While I was testing I pushed the up / down buttons just for the heck of it and I see no reason those could not be supported. I’m not sure if the command class sent by those can include the ID of the last button pressed, I’ll have to look into that.
Also, I think I could make it work like a set of 4 switches. The important thing would be to make sure that if some other switch also controlled the same device that the scene controller somehow gets a notice so the LED could be turned off.
I think most people have been using @bdahlem 's Device type Handler for this, it already works as a button controller. Did you get a chance to look at that one?
@JDRoberts I did actually, but it didn’t work well for me at all. My Leviton device lacks the ability to control a load directly, and although his device handler and smart app seem to have the feature to not control a load, in practice I had a lot of trouble and it didn’t work reliably.
When using his smart app, I often had to press a button twice or more. Sometimes the event would never be recognized. Also, the LEDs behaved oddly. I tried to use his device handler with CoRE instead and CoRE could see the scene controller and see that it had 4 buttons, but it would not recognize that the button were ever pressed.
So I took his handler and modified it so that it does not associate any buttons with loads or other devices and does not send any scene commands, to the extent that was possible. When a button is pushed, my revision just sends a button pushed event with the button number. This worked perfectly with CoRE, and now my events are processed by CoRE on the first try every time.
Cool. Just wondered what the differences were. I know there are different models of this device so it sounds like your DTH may work better with the zero model which doesn’t control the load.
@helios Can you please share your device handler? I am in the same boat at @gijosh28 and having difficulty using Bdahlem’s handler with CORE or WebCORE.
I am also interested! I have the version without the load control. (I believe the model number is VRCS4M0). I haven’t used this scene controller since leaving Vera.
Later today, I’ll give the existing one a try and see if it works. I’ve seen multiple people state that they have issues with the version without load control.
Can anyone share a device handler that works with dimming for the vrcs4? Brian’s device handler works for toggle of each button, and mpks device handler works for dimming but with no on off control. I’d really love to use these switches to their full potential, any help would be greatly appreciated tia!
Hey Jim,
What’s the status with this? I also had trouble with bdahlem’s device handler/smartapp. I have the VRCS4-M0Z (no load) scene controller. Did you publish code on github?
thanks,
