How can one use SmartThings to smoothly dim lights and cycle scenes with a Zigbee-based smart button remote, namely, the Philips Hue Dimmer Switch?
After 9 years of poor remote control functionality, I finally managed to get my LIFX lights to respond reliably to a button press for home users who don’t want to use apps to control lighting, by pairing a Philips Hue Dimmer Switch directly to SmartThings (no Hue Bridge) and setting up basic routines to toggle the lights. (SmartThings is of course also linked to my LIFX lights/account.) The lights are finally responding quite reliably.
I want the middle two buttons of the dimmer switch to raise and dim the lights gradually when held down. This is a built-in feature of the Hue Bridge (for Hue lights), but I don’t know how to do it with SmartThings. This is such a basic feature but the linkage is not obvious. Basically the light should go from 100% to 0% in X seconds, such as 5 seconds, in small increments (for example: ±2% brightness when held down every 0.1 seconds).
I also want the bottom button to cycle through scenes/themes: one press moves from one scene/theme to the next scene/theme in a circle. It would be nice if pressing and holding the bottom button could cycle through continuously, like one change every 2-5 seconds. However, that may be asking for too much.
How can these basic goals be accomplished?? Thanks!
The smooth dimming is going to be almost impossible to achieve, especially being cloud based lights, but you can do dimming step by step… with workarounds. I already requested a official action for relative brightness control with buttons but looks like it’s not happening given all the years people have been asking for it:
For the scene switching you can use my virtual scene switcher, I made it for that use case. You can go scene by scene or let it auto-switch until stopped. Note that if you want to start/stop on hold/release your button must support the release event in SmartThings, otherwise I would suggest using the “Use same action for start/stop” in the settings of the switcher and just click one time so it starts and click again when you want to stop.