Sylvania Recessed Lighting & Switches with ST

[r1r1r1r (VF)]

Hi all, first post… nice to meet y’all You all seem smart, passionate and helpful… I was hoping if you guys can help me think through my personal scenario?

Some Background:

I researched ST site’s ‘Products’ and have chosen Sylvania recessed lights, (33) tunable white & (38) color LED. The site labeled them as RT5/6

I plan on connecting/managing these (71) lights direct in my ST hub. I’ve grouped out the lights into (32) ‘areas’ to be controlled by switches - some I would like 3-way switch capable. Ultimately, I would like to be able to dim & power off/on these ‘areas’ via the wall switch but not affect ST being able to turn it back on (if the wall switch was pressed off) as well as create scenarios involving the lights via sensors, etc…

I then researched SYLVANIA LIGHTIFY by Osram 8 Function 4 Button Switch for Smart Home & SYLVANIA LIGHTIFY by Osram - Smart Home- Dimming Switch and found that these guys might solve my need…

My questions are:

A) Should I be using the Sylvania gateway hub? Or is ST hub able to group and/or do the things that I want in my use case above? If I do need the Sylvania gateway, then do I need (2) hubs because my total lights are 71 and I’m planning on adding about (20) smart switches? I read that each gateway can be responsible for (50) devices… are (2) gateways even possible?

I did read in some of this board’s post that smart switches and smart lights are not the way to go, which is why I mentioned the above two switches from Sylvania…

B) More switch focused - does anyone know if I can use (2) of the Sylvania dimmer switches to ‘cover’ both ends of a 3-way switch? Not sure if that makes sense, but I’m guessing that the Sylvania dimmers will ‘keep’ the physical positions of the lights constant so that I can just use the dimmer’s functionalities?

C) Lastly, I would like to be able to use my ST app to dim output & control colors of the (32) ‘areas’. Is that possible? I read some conflicting info in this forum’s posts where some said that you need to control the color via Sylvania’s Lightify app and not through ST?

I tried hard to piece together many posts & recommended readings, but could really use some feedback about my scenario.

Thank you for reading through my long post! Any help will be greatly appreciated…

[JDRoberts]

Sounds like an ambitious project!

A Sylvania smart light of any model can only belong to one coordinator. So either the Sylvania gateway or the SmartThings hub, but not both for any one light. The Sylvania gateway does not talk to the SmartThings hub. So if you use the gateway that just becomes a completely separate system from anything you have on SmartThings.

As far as the Sylvania switches or any of the other battery powered switches, you can put them anywhere in each one can control lights. So you can certainly create a virtual three-way that way.

You probably already read this, but here’s the FAQ on switches and smart bulbs:

FAQ: Philips Hue and Other Smart Bulbs - What sort of light switches to use with them? (Long FAQ)

Thinking on a big move to Hue lights, the real question is - what switches to use with them? If they’re all automatable via ST and other devices, do I really want to put them all on controllable switches too? There’s the advantage that I can arrange to ensure those switches are on so that the the Hue bulbs would be too…but it also leaves open the ability for folks to just turn them off and leave them off. Hmm. Thoughts?

I don’t know the specific limitations if you are using just the Sylvania gateways, but hopefully someone will chime in who does.

As far as color controls, there are options to do the color changes from SmartThings. Again, if you are using the lights with SmartThings you won’t be able to use the Sylvania app with them at all. But when you are using them with SmartThings, the official features don’t really handle groups very well. So you will need to use custom code, either one of the custom lighting smartapps or Core. But you should be able to do it.

FAQ: What is WebCoRE? (And what was CoRE?)

CoRE (now WebCore) is a very powerful community – created rules engine for SmartThings. It allows you to set up stacked conditionals like “If A then B but only while C and not if D.” Setting it up can be quite complex, but there are many community members who will be glad to help you. For example, here is a piston that one member created to notify him if the dog had already been fed twice that day and he picked up the dog bowl for a third time. He needed this because he has a large family and people didn’t always remember whose turn it was to feed the dog. [image] The original version of CoRE Has now been replaced by a new version, WebCoRE, which moves the data entry to a web interface. This allows for flexibility and an architecture that requires more memory than is av…

[r1r1r1r (VF)]

@JDRoberts - thanks very much! I saw you around the board and was hoping you’d chime in…

I didn’t know about CoRE, so this is enlightening. Will def jump into that once basic installation & set ups.

QQ - Do I need to wire a group of lights with an actual 3-way (dumb) switch in order for me actually put a battery-powered switch on top of each of the (2) switch accesses?

I’ll continue to read all the posts of this forum, so again, I appreciate your time and experience!