Hello all,
I can’t seem to find any post on this here, so I thought I’d ask away.
Are there any affordable smart dimmer light switches that natively supports transition? It can either be WiFi or Zigbee based. The one I know that definitely does this is Lutron but I’m not looking to spend over 50 bucks for each light switch, and I would need like 14 switches around the house.
The cheapest it is, the better for me. I’m looking for maybe max no more than $30 each.
I think that will be hard to find. Most switches worth the effort are going to run closer to $50 than $30. With home automation hardware you really do get what you pay for, the cheap Chinese stuff isn’t as good as a Zooz or Inovelli or even Lutron. You could, instead, spend $20 a switch and keep the dumb switches and instead put in some Shelly relays (or Fibaro or whatever) behind the dumb switches to make them smart, then you are $20 for the intelligence, $3.50 for a nice Leviton paddle and you get what you want. Shelly has dimmable relays.
hi @CO_4X4 , thanks for your suggestion. I don’t mind doing that as well. I have a ton of those dumb wall switches somewhere so I can just get the relays.
Are you referring to this one? https://www.shelly.com/en-us/products/shop/shelly-dimmer2-us
I also saw that Shelly has these dimmer wall switches https://www.shelly.com/en-us/products/shop/shelly-plus-wall-dimmer-1
I wonder if they show up in HA as having the “Transition” capability.
What does that mean? Transition from electronic to alien blob? 
. It turns on, it turns off, it dims, it brightens.
I have enough Shelly’s around I can tell you if that’s the case. They also update their firmware quite frequently so it’s possible that if it’s not there now that you’ll see it in a future update.
Lol alien blob 
if that alien blob shoots lasers and make the house look cool, I’m all for it.
Transition is the ability for a light source to gradually dim up or down in brightness, or move from one state to another, e.g. on to off, or red to blue to yellow, etc in a smooth and even manner. In some light devices, such as certain bulbs by Phillips Hue, or LED controllers such as those by Gledopto, the “Transition” option is available when setting up automations. I can set up an automation where the lights will turn on and gradually get to full brightness in 10 seconds when triggered, giving it a soft and gentle way to light up rather than an abrupt and sudden turning on of the light.
I have yet to find a smart wall dimmer light switch that has Transition natively built in, other than Lutron’s from what I’ve heard. There are scripts out there that can try and mimic the process of dim in or out of the lights, but it requires fine tuning, and doesn’t always work as smoothly, sometimes looking like micro stepping increase or decrease of brightness rather than a smooth and clean progression.
You’ve probably seen this in your automation but probably didn’t think too much about it, but this is how it looks on my Phillips Hue bulb that supports Transition.
Same thing goes for my Gledopto RGB controller
But my Treatlife Wifi smart dimmer switch doesn’t have that feature, and so it just triggers on or off at the set brightness. The Brightness step doesn’t work in the intended way.
So right now I’m working on implementing a script by Ashleyand fine tuning my wall dimmer switch to dim smoothly but so far, I’m having issues where they aren’t as smooth as I want them to be, or sometimes a bit jumpy because the dimmer switch is reaction kinda slow. Thus finding a wall dimmer switch that can actually natively support Transition would be a lot easier.
