After some opinions please.
At the moment I’m building a new office, and I plan to put some RGBW strips in the desk for top and bottom lighting and under shelves etc.
I can’t decide if I should go with the Hue Strips I already own, or should I buy some Fibaro RGBW modules and use them with the RGBW strips I bought a while back.
I’m already invested in Hue elsewhere in the house, but since I will be using Fibaro for ceiling lights and outside lights, I’m not sure what to do.
Truth be told, stability wise Hue is much better than SmartThings, but then im limited on control as I can dim etc from a p[roper switch I’d have to fully automate or use phone.
Hue has the convenience of being an all-in-one solution. Power supply, controller and strip. Which could also be a limitation if you need separation between components. Fibaro would consist of components with some wiring and connections required. Which is also the advantage for device placement. One advantage is Fibaro offers a separate white channel.
I put an RGBW strip as under desk lighting. The Fibaro module I got wouldn’t work with SmartThings, with the driver available - it wasn’t clear whether it was a faulty module or incompatible driver, but it looked like too much work to fix if it was the driver. I got a Qubino module and with a slight tweak to kjamsek’s driver it’s working perfectly.
I have two Dresdens, 5 Fibaro, and 1 Qubino for every day accent lighting controlled by SmartThings (both Smart Lighting and WebCORE). I like the individual channel control of the Qubino, but still uncertain what I would buy next. I also had 5 inexpensive controllers on some holidays lights. 1 Bluetooth, 1 RF and 3 Wi-fi controllers. The Bluetooth had terrible range, as did the RF. Neither controllable by Alexa or SmartThings and both used with addressable RGB.
There is a convenience to the Wi-Fi ones as they use the Magic Home phone app which has time of day scheduling with color selection and individual white channel control. For very limited SmartThings control, I plugged them into Iris plug-in outlets.
Like Neil, I used the same device handler with the Qubino, but “as is” as I have no knowledge of how to tweak device handlers.
To elaborate slightly… the problem I had with kjamsek’s driver was to do with the if(!state.isMcDevice){ statements. I can’t remember which way round it was, but my device either initially reported itself as multichannel and then behaved as if it wasn’t, or initially reported itself as not multichannel and then behaved as if it was. My tweak was just to force it into the correct mode by setting the state.isMcDevice manually - after which it worked fine.
Just tested, and the colour wheel in the new app didn’t work for me either. After sitting spinning for a while it showed a network error alert.
I’ve never tried it before - I use Home Assistant and MQTT now, this providing a far better user interface than the old app did. And while the new app has significantly improved the ui since I set that up, most of the time it only shows a small proportion of my devices, making it completely useless (especially when the colour wheel doesn’t work on those rare occasions when it’s accessible).