Lutron Connected Bulb Remote

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.

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I did a little packet sniffing on this device. It pairs to the bulb using ZLL Commissioning (touchlink) and sends all commands using it’s unique group number. It does not seem to support any endpoint binding, unfortunately. It would respond with success to a bind command, but it wouldn’t send anything other than a group multicast when a button is pushed.

I don’t think there’s any way right now to configure SmartThings to accept a group multicast packet.

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This is good to know. Well if it cant be bound to the hub then it can’t be used for anything other than controlling local lights. Thanks @rpress!!

I just picked one of these up at my local Home Depot and I was able to get it to pair with the ST Hub v2. It only recognized it as a thing and doesn’t display anything in the logs. I moved over from Wink to this new Hub for the local control and I have 3 Lutron Caseta switches and a pico remote that won’t work.

Local control is coming to wink in the very near future.

Lutron Connected Bulb Remote: Secondary controller that does not report back the the SmartThings hub, but can toggle zigbee bulbs that are also controlled by SmartThings

That’s all that’s going to happen for now, smartthings to recognize it as a thing. That’s important, because it will then allow you to have the remote control individual bulbs which are also controlled by smartthings so you’re going to get to parallel means of control. However smartthings will not know what the lutron connected bulb remote did, so the status will be out of sync until the next time that smartthings happens to poll that bulb.

If you do not pair the Lutron connected bulb remote to smartthings, then it will have a different network ID than smart things does and it will probably steal your bulbs from smartthings altogether. That’s a worse result.

Pico Remote: does not work with SmartThings

The pico remote is not going to pair to smart things, and is not going to work with it. There are other remotes that you can use that are similar, in particular the Aeon Minimote, more about those at the end of this post.

Lutron Caseta Switches: cannot integrate directly with SmartThings. You can use the IFTTT integration, but it may have lag

Smartthings does not support the LUtron Caseta protocol. So there’s no way to pair these directly to SmartThings. They do both have an IFTTT channel, and that works pretty well, but you may have some leg.

There is another method if you have a Staples connect controller but that method does not work with wink as far as I know. And it’s still indirect anyway.

Remotes that do work with SmartThings

There is a topic that lists the remotes and buttons that work with SmartThings. Those can be set up to controls zigbee bulbs or Z wave switches change modes or run routines. You’re still stuck with indirect connections for the Caseta lights though.

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I am aware, there are other reasons for my departure.

Thanks that is good information. I have been lurking around for 3 days now and I understand the reasons why my switches and picos won’t work. Just means I’ll be running dual hubs for now. I actually went to Home Depot to get two GE bulbs and saw this remote. The thought process behind getting the remote was that I could get these and and have the look and functionality of the picos but using zigbee. I was hoping that it would be simple for ST to add these to the hub but looks like lutron made them not standard if I’m understanding this thread correctly.

They’re perfectly standard for zigbee as a handheld remote. The Wink integration with status update is something special that those two companies agreed to. Hopefully SmartThings can set up the same arrangement sometime soon. :sunglasses:

I migrated from SC to v2. Fortunately I have only 1 Caseta switch and several pico remotes. You are able to unpair or reset the remotes and pair them directly to the switch. This works for me now until ST supports Lutron or I decide to invest in a new switch.

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The second picture. Is that a Lutron remote or a Philips dimmer switch/remote? It looks exactly the same.

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Aaaagh! It’s a Philips of course. I’ll move my post. Thanks for the correction. :flushed:

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Nothing can be as good looking as Philips! :wink: 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.

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So it’s entirely possible that the Lutron remote captured my Cree bulb. Does anyone know how I can get it back on the ST hub? The hub still sees it but can’t do anything with it, even after I reset the remote. Thanks!

If you stole the bulb from ST you’ll need to do a reset on the Cree. On one second off two. Repeat two times and wait for flash.

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Thank you so much! That did the trick.

One thing I noticed about this remote is that as far as I can tell it doesn’t handle on/off like I expect. The “off” button appears to dim the bulb to 0 and not send a normal off() command. So if I refresh the bulb the level shows 0 and an on() command through ST won’t produce any light because it’s dimmed to 0. Similarly the “on” button appears to send a command that sets the level to full brightness, not simply tell the bulb to turn on.

Is anyone else experiencing this?

I ended up pairing the Cree Bulb right to the remote. I attached the remote to the wall in the kids room low enough so my 2yr old can reach it. Now he does not have to climb on toys to get to the switch. I expect less injury’s now:)

Any luck getting it to work with Smartthings? or will it never work till they do something about it?

We need to hack this… Looks like it running an android OS?
Wall mount

I have 3 Connected Bulb Remotes purchased 2 weeks ago which I have no use for anymore. I am using the Amazon Echo and installed a GE Z-wave Dimmer switch.

Anyone interested in them?

Direct connection to bulbs is the best you can do, but if you connect it to ST first, you can at least have dual control. Just be cognizant that ST might not see state changes initiated by the remote.

I have an idea for a SmartApp that could help you manage what bulbs it controls without having to go through the pair process with the remote for every bulb, but ST won’t be able to see the button presses until something changes on their end.

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