Cooper Aspire 4way controlling Hue bulbs

I have a 4way Cooper Aspire dimmer circuit, and want it to control 3 Hue bulbs (three Kitchen pendants configured as one light source, not independently). The switches’ wiring does not affect the load on the always-on Hue bulbs. I’m having problems getting this to work and need advice. Here in the community I saw these dimmers recommended as immediate response wireless remotes, which is exactly what I want.

I’m aware of 2 main approaches:

Theory 1) Associate the Cooper dimmers natively in the Z-Wave mesh, then configure ST to control the master.
I had the dimmers initially setup as controlling the load on some dimmable bulbs, and I’ve seen the association and dimming work “conventionally.” When I then tried to configure ST with “Smart Lighting” automations, the associations bypassed ST, so they didn’t cooperate well with ST.

Best success so far: associations work perfectly for on/off/dim across all switches, but I would have to use the master to control the load (ie: not Hue bulbs), and I would have to NOT use ST.

Theory 2) Only use ST configuration to have the dimmers affect the Hue bulbs. My initial attempts to have only the master affect the Hue bulbs worked fine for on/off, but I couldn’t figure out how to have the dimmer’s dim setting affect the bulbs. Then configuring the auxiliary dimmers to affect the master, and the master to affect the auxiliaries seemed to cause extra toggles each time I toggled a switch manually or via ST app.

Best success so far: configure only the master to control the always-on Hue bulbs via manual and ST, but no aux switches, and not the dimmer’s dim value.

Color: I assume in both of the approaches above, that I’ll have to control color via ST.

Hardware:

  • 1x RF-9540 master dimmer,
  • 2x RF-9542 auxiliary dimmers,
  • 3x Hue bulbs (might as well be 1 for sake of the discussion),
  • 1x minimote
  • SmartThings Hub, 2nd Generation
    (I’m also using GE 12724 Z-Wave Smart Dimmers, but they need to be polled, thus huge delay in on/off)

Skills:

  • I’m a software developer
  • I’m new to ST
  • I’ve used the “Smart Lighting” SmartApp, but not other apps or “custom code”
  • I got lots of patience for this crap

You probably already know this part, but for others finding this thread later, here’s the overview FAQ for how custom code works in smart things:

So now you’ve got two separate issues to solve with custom code. One is color control of the Hues, and the other is getting the Cooper switches to follow Each other for dimming. To be honest, I’m not sure if you can do it all with one smart app or if you’re going to need two.

Since you have a technical background, there is a community project in the early stages of development for an extremely sophisticated rules engine. Because it’s just an alpha, there will be glitches, and you may have to from time to time remove everything you’ve done and reinstall. But if you do get involved you’ll be able to work directly with the developer and can influence which features are added. Here’s the thread for that. ( again, this is a bunch of highly technical people talking to each other, and not a fully baked solution yet. )

If you prefer to look at something which is much more mature, there’s an excellent smartapp for managing Hue scenes. You can also ask in that author’s topic if anyone is using dimmer switches as masters (again, always with the caveat that a physical dimmer switch should not control the current sent to a smart bulb).

Separately, the issue of having one dimmer follow another using the hub as the middleman, there are several popular smart apps that do this. “Dim with me” and “dim and dimmer” are both well established.

This is a newer one which would also be worth looking at because it’s a “many to many” version of dim with me, so it might fit your set up better. Dim with me assumes one master switch and then everyone else follows it. What people have traditionally done with that is to install it multiple times with each partner as a master in one version. So if you have switches A, B and C, one version has a as the master, another version has B as the master, and a third version has C as the master. This newer “synchronized dimming” smart app does all of that in one install.

There are a lot of other lighting smart apps with different variations, so you can just check the community created smart apps area of the forum and see what’s there. :sunglasses:

My HLGS app has ability to create / manage / delete both Hue Hub (HH) scenes and (ii) HH groups. You can use any existing scenes or groups that you may have already created on the HH. The HLGS app creates a momentary switch on ST to control the application of a HH Scene. The app creates a custom group device to control the HH groups. You can create / modify / delete new HH scenes or groups directly from the HLGS app.

In your case, I would recommend creating a new group containing your 3 Hue bulbs. Then just associate the dimmer to the HH group. That way, you don’t need to synchronize anything else.

Tony

If I understand the details, part of the issue is that the OP wants to have 3 or 4 Cooper dimmers all acting in concert, so they can enter from any side of the room and use the switch there and the statuses for all the other switches would synch up.

So they’re trying to both control the Hues and synch the Coopers to each other and report all statuses accurately in ST.

Ah, I didn’t fully consider that. BUT…he could then use the Dim With Me app (so that the sync is only 1 way from Cooper device to Hue Group device) to associate each Cooper dimmer with the Group device. In the ST app, each dimmer may not show the actual level of the group, but this setup should allow physical control to work just fine.

Thanks, I’ve got some reading to do across all the relevant posted details.

In the meantime, could someone just list the high level steps for a plausible approach that I could follow? Sometimes merely knowing the right order for setup/config can help avoid lots of problems. If there’s a second plausible approach it would be good for me (and posterity) to post its details as well.

Oh, and yup, you’re right. The 3 dimmers are at the entrances to the kitchen and should ideally all be in sync in on/off/dim state. Another assumption is that my wife will be yelling across the house that the expensive pendant switches aren’t working right.

Just found this today, it might be useful:

Thanks for the “Dim-a-Hue” tip. It’s been the closest fit so far.

I’m embarrassed to say that I finally got around to trying your suggestions. The IDE was strange to setup, and I even tried CoRE. I’m having more luck than before, and I hope to continue this project thread as I made advancements.

So far, I’m getting some strange “bounce” sometimes (1 in 5?) when turning on/off. The light goes off then back on, or on then back off. No luck yet with syncing the 3 dimmers. I tried “Dim With Me”, but not sure if I even got the latest one.

I’m having to create new SmartApps by copying code in when the IDE won’t connect to the github repo. Is that normal?