Lutron Connected Bulb Remote

My store in GA has them. Limited availability on end cap 1. The stores in my area all have a home automation end cap near the front.

It’s possible they haven’t gotten them yet as it’s a new item just starting to ship to stores it’s also likely that even if they do have them they’re in the over heads waiting for a reset in september… I know for a fact my store got them in on tuesday and most likely put them on the floor for sale by accident

As for how I got them to work with my hue and ge link I just did a factory reset on the remote then held had to sink it multiple times for some of the lights. When I originally tried setting it up with the hues it would indicated it was connected and flash the bulbs and remote and then not respond I eventually got it sync correctly one the first try to one of my other hue bulbs and from there it was just wash and repeat and repeat and repeat… and some more repeating then it all worked

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Remember when I said there were technically different ways it could work, and some might work better with smartthings than others?

I suspect that one of the ways it works is just a straight zigbee binding with the individual end devices.

If that’s the case, you may be able to control individual bulbs, but smartthings wouldn’t realize their status had changed.

The fact that they list the wink hub as compatible makes me think there may be two ways to control the bulbs, one through the hub. If that’s so, the hub will need to know what to do with the messages. So that’s the one that might work for wink but not work for smartThings.

On the other hand, maybe we’ll be able to set it up as a button controller like the smartenIt zigbee three toggle switch or the aspire RF9500. That would be great!

$30 is a pretty good price, though, so I’m hoping it does work with SmartThings. :sunglasses:

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$30 really hits the price sweet spot for me. I’ll be heading out to my nearest HD later today to try to pick one of these up. I doubt it’ll work with the hub out of the box, but maybe it’ll pair up as a ā€œThingā€ and I’ll see if I can capture the button presses.

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No luck at my store :frowning: I’m told it’s likely up in top stock, but no one willing to dig for it. Oh well.

The other store had them in the Lutron dimmer display near the outlets and switches, not on the home automation end cap. They had about 8 left. I picked up two. If the SO lets me work on it, I might have a crack at it later today.

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Ok. Interesting development. It appears to be able to touchlink reset my Hue bulb that was attached directly to the ST hub (hub is a channel 14). Hold the off and level up buttons on the remote while holding it very close to the Hue. The bulb turns orange indicating factory reset. It stole the bulb away from ST. The Lutron remote identifies as a ZLL non-color controller. I’m not sure if it brings it over to a ZLL channel compatible with the Hue hub though. No Hue hub to test with.

edit for those interested:
rawDescription desc: 01 C05E 0820 02 04 0000 1000 FF00 FC44 08 1000 0003 0006 0008 0004 0005 0000 FF00

I’m really tempted now to go ā€œborrowā€ a Hue hub from BB to test this out…

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Now you challenged me, was on the way to HD. I’ll look for one. I have the hue hub, so if HD has the remote in stock, I’ll test the hub tonight.

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This could be a great solution for people wanting to switch over from a Staples Connect or Wink hub. Currently I have multiple wall-mounted Pico-remotes that control different zigbee/zwave devices through the Staples Connect Hub. I recently ordered the v2 hub and was worried about having to replace all of my lutron devices. Now it looks like I’ll just get this zigbee pico remote to replace the three wall mounted picos I have and then get a wink hub for $20 to allow smartthings to control the rest of my dimmers via IFTTT. Sure beats paying an additional $400 to replace all of my caseta dimmers even if it isn’t a perfect solution…

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No luck for me. Not yet in stock at the nearest HD. I am also trying to find an alternative to avoid replacement of a dozen Caseta switches.

The remote isn’t supposed to be for sale to Sept 1st so don’t be shocked if you can’t find it. I found this out when Wink replied to my email letting me know it wasn’t supported yet and it wasn’t supposed to be sold until it’s official release date which is Sept. 1st they also wanted to know the store I got it at so they could call them and have it removed from the shelves

It’s going to come down to the exact use case as to whether this will help people transitioning from other systems or not.

The new remote is zigbee remote. It cannot communicate with the Lutron Caseta devices directly. (Different radio frequencies)

A zigbee device can only be associated with one primary controller. So it can be associated with wink . It may be able to be associated with smart things. But one remote won’t be able to be associated with both at the same time.

If you just like the form factor, then it might give you a transition. But it’s not going to give smartthings control over your lutron Caseta devices.

There will be some use cases where you can use IFTTT as a "man in the middle protocol "but you could do that with any switch that was accessible to IFTTT.

So it’s not A zigbee/lutron bridge. It’s just a zigbee remote made by Lutron.

If it works with smartthings, that will be great, but it will be a replacement for the other switches that work with SmartThings, like the Aeon Minimote or the smartenIt 3 toggle device. Not a way of adding Lutron clear connect protocol Devices into SmartThings.

My work around to be able to use my Caseta without Wink, which I greatly dislike, was to get the Lutron bridge and connect it to Harmony. It has been working pretty well for me, when Harmony doesn’t play around with their updates and kicks my ST connection out. The Lutron bridge is pretty reliable.

What type of functionality can you get with that interface? Does it report the light status in the smartthings app or only allow you to turn it off/on?

I wish, the main hub in this particular set up is Harmony. ST provides the sensors while Lutron provides access to Caseta. Maybe one day when Harmony integration to ST will be fixed, I’ll be able to do more.I use this for lights based on sensors and works a whole lot better than Wink/IFTTT combo, which I also tried.

That’s kind of funny. There’s absolutely no Wink branding on the packaging anywhere and it’s not stocked on the Wink endcap. They really shouldn’t care as this appears to be an entirely standalone product.

Anyway, I have gotten it to pair to the ST hub and it will act as a secondary controller for connected bulbs (I’d imagine Zigbee switches, too), but ST does not see the change in state (at least with GE Link bulbs). It’s clearly grouping the bulbs as they all respond instantly with no lag. So for now, it works great as a backup switch (would work during a ST outage) or a sort of scene controller, but don’t hold your breath on using it as a generic button controller for now. :frowning:

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What steps did you use to define which bulbs it controlled?

It may need to be paired to the hub first. I don’t recall if I did that first or tried the bulbs right out of the box. I can post a basic ā€œstubā€ device type, but it should be fine even paired as a ā€œThingā€ since I’m assuming it just needs the network key, etc. that would be provided on join.

Pairing to the hub needs to be done on a factory reset remote (hold On and Off until remote stops flashing ~30 sec) using the same method as a bulb: hold On while ST is in discovery mode.

You hold the ā€œOnā€ button while holding the remote near the bulb (4" or so). The bulb will identify by flashing and if that’s the bulb you want, just keep holding the button until the remote stops blinking. If it grabbed the wrong one, let go of the On button right away and try the process again. It’ll pair/bind to up to 30 devices.

OK, that sounds like you directly bound the bulbs to the remote. In that case there’s no way for the hub to know what the status is.

What we would be looking for is something like what’s been done for the smartenIT 3 toggle device. It’s also a zigbee device, but instead of binding it directly to anything, we add it as a button controller. That way each button press is treated something like a contact sensor. That information goes to the hub, and we have a software set up so that when the hub detects the button being pressed, then the hub sends the instruction out to the desired device. This is how the minimote also works even though it’s a Zwave device.

That way the status gets updated because it’s actually the hub that is sending the instruction.

Yeah, in this setup that’s what’s happening. I did try configuring this similar to the SmartenIT remote, but ST doesn’t seem to get the button presses. I’ll try playing around with it a bit more, but it seems like a dead end as far as that’s concerned.