Wanted to update this thread with my experience with the Connected Bulb Remote, my Cree bulbs, and ST. I don’t have a wink, just ST and I was looking for a reliable way to wall-control all the lamps in a room (rather than having to unlock the phone, get into and app, etc). I had tried the z-wave 7 scene controller and found it to be too unreliable to deploy around the house. This remote is a great solution - I used the wall mount in one room and it looks great. I’ve got it programed for another room and plan on deploying it in two more rooms, all of which will be wall mounted for four total rooms. Others in this thread were extremely helpful as I figured out programming for the remote with ST.
As earlier posts suggested, if you take the remote out of the packaging and follow the directions for pairing your Cree bulbs to the remote (holding the top button for 30 seconds near the bulb), the remote will steal the bulbs from the ST hub so they can only be controlled by the remote and not the hub. I wanted to control both. So, I reset the remote (holding top and bottom buttons for 30-45 seconds), then I put ST in discovery mode and joined the remote to ST (holding the top button for about 30 seconds). Note that this tripped me up at first because ST doesn’t recognize it usually as it would other things so I opened live tracking and watched for the remote to be seen and then stopped the joining process. The remote appears under unconfigured things and can’t be modified in any way and doesn’t show state, etc but it can be added to a room for what that’s worth. With that out of the way, I then took the remote over to each bulb that I wanted to control with the remote, and, with the bulb on and the remote within a couple inches of the bulb, I joined the bulb to the remote (holding top button for about 30 seconds until the bulb flashes). Now, ST can still control those bulbs, but I’m able to use the remote as a secondary controller mounted on the wall for a 100% reliable secondary controller. It is a perfect solution for my house.
The only issue is that, as others said earlier on this thread, in this configuration with ST and Cree bulbs, the bulb status is not updated in ST when state is changed on the remote. This is really only an irritation but does become an issue if you’ve got a routine (like “Sleeping” which turns off all house lights at night) because even though the routine is programmed to turn off those bulbs, it doesn’t actually send an off command if it thinks the lamps are already off. Here’s hoping ST officially supports the remotes soon so we get state changes and this issue is eliminated. Otherwise, the benefits of this solution for my home are great - reliable wall control of lamps in a room - we’re really happy with the remotes.
I love that thing. I got one installed and 5 more unopened which I am going to put in each room once I am on my feet again. Not sure how Philips does it right every time. Did you look at the instructions? Precisely laid down.