If the bulbs pair with the remote, you have a problem, because zigbee devices can only have one coordinator. So the bulbs can either belong to the remote or they can belong to the hub, but not both.
So that means that you are not going to be able to use the remote as the manufacturer has designed it.
a SmartThings button controller?
So the question is, is there another way that you can use it? The ideal here would be if the remote can be paired to the hub such that the hub will recognize a button press from the remote and then the hub could turn around and tell the bulbs what to do. Smartthings calls this a “button controller.” It can be either Z wave, like the Aeon minimote, or zigbee, like the smarten IT three toggle. But the key is the remote must send messages to the hub every time A button is pressed on it.
The problem here is that devices which are intended to be a coordinator, like this remote, don’t necessarily send information about what they’ve done to another Coordinator. If it doesn’t, there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s not in the device handler. The device itself has to be sending the message. All a device handler does is decode the message that was sent. But if the messages aren’t sent in the first place the hub won’t know about it. So a device may pair OK to the hub, but still not send the button press messages later.
Current similar devices
Right now there are 3 big brand zigbee remotes on the market which are intended to act as coordinators to a set of bulbs. These are the Phillips hue dimmer switch, the Lutron connected bulb remote, and the Osram lightify smart switch. They look pretty similar, but they all work somewhat differently. Specifically, they send different Zigbee Clusters.
Community members have been trying to get all three to work as button controllers that communicate to the smartthings hub. So far the only success has been with the Osram. The Lutron and the Phillips can be paired to the hub, but after that people have run into different issues and they just aren’t working that well.
a parallel means of control instead of a button controller
Because the Phillips can be paired to its own bridge, it can be used as a parallel means of control rather than a button controller. That means that when someone presses the button on the Phillips hue switch, the Hue bridge knows about it and tells the bulbs what to do. Then about five minutes later, smartthings will poll the bridge to get the current status of the bulbs. So you can use the switch, but smartthings itself doesn’t know anything happened, it just gets the end result status information from the bridge. Which is good for some use cases, but not others.
So what about the Kudled remote
So that brings us to this Kudled remote. There are several possibilities, but you will have to work with one of the zigbee coding Masters in the community and look at the live logs and see exactly what is happening.
Here are the possibilities:
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maybe the device is just a regular zigbee device and could work like the iris smart button. But I don’t think so. Not if it can act as a coordinator to the bulbs. ( which the iris button cannot)
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maybe the device is going to be like the Lutron remote and you will be able to pair it to the hub and have it act as a button controller for a little while, but then you will run into problems so it won’t be a practical device.
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maybe the device is going to be like the Phillips hue dimmer switch and you will be able to pair it to a hue bridge and use it as a parallel means of control. Of course then you also have to connect the bulbs to a Hue bridge rather than directly to the smart things hub.
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or maybe it will be like the Osram lightify dimming switch and you will actually be able to use it as a button controller. Obviously that would be the best outcome. But it depends on the exact zigbee messages that it sends to the hub
OK, now I’m going to make a wild guess that we actually have no evidence for as yet. But the Kudled bulbs are hue knockoffs. They pretty obviously have been reversed engineered from Hues. So I’m going to guess that their remote was reversed engineered from number three above, the Phillips hue dimmer switch. If that’s the case, I think there’s a pretty good chance that you will be able to pair it to a Hue bridge and use it as a parallel means of control. But like I said, no evidence for this, I’m just guessing based on other things this company has done.
Going forward
To go forward, you need to get someone to help you walk through the process to figure out whether this device is going to fall under one, two, three, or four. It’s going to mean a lot of trial and error, where you do different things with the device and capture the log entries, then post those log entries so one of the master coders can help you review them, then they give you some new code to try, and then you try it and report back on the next set of log entries.
They can give you a lot of help, but it is going to be in a lot of work on your part, so you need to decide whether that’s worth it to you.
But if you don’t do that, you are not going to be able to use the remote, because again the bulb can only belong to one Zigbee Cordinator. So once you have a bulb set up to work with SmartThings, the hub will own the bulb, and the remote will not be able to control it anymore. Unless you can get One of the four options described above to work. And that’s just going to depend on exactly what this remote device actually does each time a button is pressed.
Tagging @mitchp @Sticks18 @erocm1231 to see if any of them have time and interest in this project.
I would note that the manufacturer says that the remote is a ZLL device.
, so I don’t know if it’ll be something I can get around to soon.