I have three separate light fixtures with three separate Lutron Caseta In-Wall dimmers on my patio (plus many other Caseta devices, but that’s not part of this post). Everything is working fine within the Lutron App and they all show up and work fine in the SmartThings App.
I set up an Automation such that any time Patio Light 1 is turned on, it also turns on Patio Light 2 and Patio Light 3. I did the same for the other two lights (ie Turn on PL2 and PL1 and PL3 turn on, etc), and the same for turning all three Off.
But sometimes I actually might want to turn on just one of those lights.
So it seems that if there were a Double-Tap or Long-Press function on the Caseta Wall Dimmers – or some other supported trigger that is not simply “on” or “off”, then I could program that action as the trigger for a Macro to turn on (or off) all three lights.
Is there any such capability within the Lutron Caseta Wall Dimmers? Or is there some way to program the desired behavior in SmartThings? (ie If Dimmer is ON and the ON button is pressed, then…)
Thank you.
p.s. This is my first post here on the ST Community. I just jumped ship from Wink (they’ll be out of business soon) and the transition could not have been easier and more straightforward. FYI the Wink sometimes didn’t execute automations fully (sometimes a light was left on or off when it shouldn’t) and the lights never ever responded quickly. But with SmartThings, the lights go on and off within a second, and that’s pretty darn cool. Couldn’t be happier so far.
-M
Trying to capture a double tap on a switch that doesn’t support it with software hardly ever works. Cloud latency throws off the timing.
There are some zwave switches from other brands with this feature built in so that the switch itself detects the tap pattern, such as Homeseer, but I assume you don’t want to change devices just to get this feature.
What you could do is add a battery powered multi button device like the Remotec 90 or the Aeotec Wallmote and get additional scene controls that way.
Both are popular in the community.
They do require custom code, so I don’t know if you’re interested in that. But both are nice devices.
Thank you for the comprehensive answer and warm welcome.
You’re right that I’d like to avoid putting another device there. If I had to, I’d just add a pico remote and set it to “all on”, which is pretty simple. Just trying to avoid doing that.
If I were willing to have a 1s to 2s between the double taps, would the cloud latency still be a problem? Would it be possible to do?
How bad is the latency? (internet connection is a <20s ping, 250mbps down, 20mbps up).
Thanks.
-Mark
The problem is the unpredictability of the latency. Sometimes it might be a half second or less, sometimes it might be a couple of seconds, and you just can’t get the timing right to make double tap work.
The other problem is that humans just aren’t consistent and they have been a lot of complaints about situations where someone turn the light on, then decides they want to turn it off again immediately but the double tap kicks in and turns on even more lights.
It’s been tried many many times with several different brands of switches And pretty much everybody ends up giving up on it after a couple of months.
You could try it with webcore and see if you’re satisfied with the results. (Webcore is essentially a scripting language for smartthings.)
The other issue is that Caseta in-wall dimmers don’t work that way. Tapping the top button on a Caseta device will not result in a “button” event being sent to ST. The attached load will be set to 100%. That’s just the way that the in-wall dimmers work. They can’t be configured to work any other way.
The native ST Lutron integration doesn’t support Pico’s, but there are community integrations that do. They require the pro bridge though because they connect through Telnet to the Lutron Pro bridge. And you could implements a double-tap function in a custom DTH. The Lutron bridge publishes only 2 events for every button, pushed and released. So, your DTH would have to add code to destinguish between push, hold and double-tap. These integrations require a NodeJS server running locally though.
