Syncing smart bulbs with a Z-wave wall switch

Mozilla IoT
#1

I’ve just dipped my toe into WebThings by buying a single LIFX wifi bulb and so far I’m impressed with the ease with which it detected and controls the bulb. So, I’m now thinking ahead to making some of this tech more integral to my home lighting.

The thing is, while controlling bulbs remotely is great, it seems to me for 90% of situations the traditional low-fi-switch-on-a-wall controls are just fine, and there is an obvious flaw of just having a wifi bulb on it’s own which either renders the wall switch or wi-fi control useless, as my gf is keen to point out. A few google searches confirm this is a reasonably common issue (and that the fairer sex are particularly tuned in to this!) but solutions seem to be fairly unique depending on the smart home tech in play.

So, I need a WebThings compatible smart wall switch which is aware of and can control the bulbs current state / properties, even if not all available properties (i.e. can switch on or dim but doesn’t necessarily need to control the colour pallette.

After some searching I’ve found a Z-wave Plus compatible switch from MCO that I really like because it a) looks the bees knees (the Philips Hue dimmers look hideous in my opinion); b) is compatible with UK light switch wiring; and c) claims to support scenes (though exactly how I don’t quite get because it’s not clear what gesture(s) are used to go beyond binary control)

My question is how easily could this smart switch be integrated with bulbs using WebThings? Even if I could just get it to work in a binary sense that would probably make me (and my gf) happy enough to give it a try, if it could control one or more scenes as well that would be a bonus.

I have an IT background, though mainly as a SQL engineer but I do know JavaScript in a web context and a little bit of Python so would be willing to have a go at writing an adapter if necessary, though might need a bit of hand-holding to get started.

#2

It seems to me that you’re over-complicating things. Unless you really need RGB or temperature-shifting bulbs, you’d probably be better off using plain LED bulbs with a smart switch/dimmer of you’re choosing. Power-cycling a Wi-Fi smart bulb is a long-ish process, so you’re going to end up losing connectivity quite a bit when trying to pair it with an actual switch.

#3

Yes that’s a fair point, I’m over-thinking it. So to get a MCO Z-Wave dimmer working with WebThings am I right in thinking I would need to write a new adapter if it’s not in the list of supported hardware here? I might need a bit of guidance to get started but I can start a new thread for that, or is there any documentation specific to Z-Wave devices I can refer to beforehand?

#4

No, you wouldn’t need a new adapter. There are a lot of things that will work that are not in that list. That list is curated by users who feel like adding their hardware, so it’s far from complete.

If you get the device and find that it doesn’t fully work, you can open an issue and we’ll take a look.

#5

Excellent, I’ll give it a try in one room to start with. Thanks for your help.