You may be right that there are proprietary aspects to some of the wall controls and receivers that could impact some functions, but there are definitely a lot of universal wall controls with the 4 dip switches on the market (and some come with their own receiver),
but I have 8 ceiling fans in my house and on my back patio that are a combination of Minka Aire, Harbor Breeze, and Casa Vieja models. As I added more fans and updated some pull-chain fans to wireless remote/wall control operated units, I initially didn’t
keep track of how the various dip switches were set on each unit and would accidentally have controls in one room operating multiple fans throughout the house because the dip switches happened to be set on the same pattern. It didn’t seem to matter what
brand anything was, just that the dip switch settings matched. I definitely had controllers from one brand operating fans from a different brand. Eventually, I went through and gave each fan and corresponding controller their own dip switch combination and
wrote them all down, so now everything works independently without any interference.
Granted, there are certainly fans that have more/different options than others (# of fan speeds/auto blade reverse, etc.), but a huge amount of fans and universal remotes/wall controls on the market are basically configured like this one:
My thinking was that if you essentially took a product like this, but gave it z-wave capability to accept commands and transmit to the hub the state of the device in the event someone uses the wall control, you’d be able to just set the dip switches to match
your existing fan’s receiver and it would be no more difficult than installing any of the light switches/dimmers already on the market by GE/Honeywell/Jasco, Inovelli, Zooz, Nutone, etc. Maybe the solution is sell a switch with the receiver kind of like this
sample universal fan control that I linked to, then if people need it because the wall control doesn’t properly communicate with their existing fan receiver, they can still use the z-wave wall control, but people who have some luck with the wall control properly
communicating with their existing fan receiver don’t have to go to the trouble of partially uninstalling their ceiling fan and rewiring in a new receiver. From a consumer perspective, probably the best case scenario would be if a company like Inovelli sold
a wall control without a receiver for a little less money and a bundled wall control/receiver for a little more (or just sell them separately). That way people who don’t need the receiver aren’t wasting money on it, but people whose existing receivers won’t
work with the wall control have the option to buy a bundle with the wall control and the receiver. Their install would be a little more difficult than the people who just need to swap out the wall control, but at least they’d have the ability to make virtually
any fan z-wave compatible.
But I’m just a home automation consumer/geek with very little technical understanding of how they work. I’m good at installing them, programming scenes, getting various products like Vera, Alexa, Bond, etc., to talk to each other, etc., but I’ll be damned if
I understand the technical side of how all of it works, so it’s certainly possible that there are all sorts of technical issues that would screw up the concept.
Litex Industries - Litex WCI-100 Wall Command Universal Ceiling Fan Control, Three Speeds and Full Range Dimmer -When installing a Litex or any other fan and you need a wall control unit that is easy to install.