Sylvania Recessed Lighting & Switches with ST

[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 [image] The original version of CoRE Has now been replaced by a new version, WebCoRE, which moves the data entry to a web interface.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…