New GE switches: anyone have hands on using their associations capability?

Devices & Integrations
1

Hello,

From discussion here it seems that the new GE switches have the capability to do wireless control of other devices through zwave association.

Has anyone had hands on with this?

How is the performance?

While linear has announced zwave plus versions of their switches I do not see them available for sale yet.

And previous versions of linear switches use pigtails for connections, I prefer the GE switches connection method.

The performance of zwave association control by linear aux switches are instant so I would want to the GE switch behavior to be as performant.

Are there any other zwave plus switches that have zwave association control that are recommended?

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You have to be careful with this question because the functionality of zwave association changed significantly with zwave plus.

In the older Z wave generations, association was optional, and manufacturers could and did implement it pretty much any way they wanted as far as which command sets were used in which association groups. For example, Fibaro quite famously used one Association group specifically for tamper notifications. While other manufacturers who made multi-button Devices might use one Association group for each button. It got pretty confusing.

With zwave plus, they decided to regularize how association is used, while still maintaining backwards compatibility for previous generations.

So…

Almost all zwave plus devices must now support Association group one as a “lifeline” Group which reports status to the hub. It is not used to trigger events on other end devices. This is almost the opposite of how it used to be, because most manufacturers used to use Association group one for the communication between two end devices. Battery operated devices are now supposed to report their battery status via the lifeline group.

If the zwave plus device is supposed to be able to trigger events on another end device without going through the hub, it will probably use Association group two for that. As that is not considered a lifeline condition.

So the answer to your question is going to be yes for any zwave plus device, because now they all support association. But they only are required to support it for the lifeline commands in Association group one. To get the direct communication to another end device, such as linear uses for their virtual three ways, you now have to look at exactly which association groups it supports, because the ability to send basic commands is now going to be in Association group 2 or higher.

But remember the backwards compatibility requirement for Z wave, which means there may be some devices on the network still using Association group one for something other than lifeline messages. :scream:

All of which means you just have to look at each individual Device to see if it supports the specific use case you have in mind.

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4

@JDRoberts

thanks for the information!

That is a reason I am asking does anyone have hands on experience with these specific devices?

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With the GE switches, it’s even worse, because the company put out two different versions of the same Z wave plus model, one which was certified in 2015 and one which was certified in 2016.

The first one only supported the lifeline group.

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The second one supports three association groups, which allows for direct triggering of another end device and also allows for double tap.

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Same model number!

I honestly don’t know if you can tell from the box which one it is.

There is a community – created DTH for the newest version, so you can see comments from some people who have it there:

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