For my renovation project I’ve done some research in how to automate my lighting. As there will be a lot of IoT devices I want to be working with a wired system to ensure enough room for all the additional wireless devices in the end.
Secondary I would like a stand alone wired system that can operate even when Home Assistant is out for a few minutes to prevent interruptions.
Because of those reasons I ended up with DALI, which is commonly used for building lighting automation.
After comparing a lot of brands I ended up with Dali4Net from Lunatone. Because this module has 4 dali lines with up to 265 DALI devices. This was important as there will be 4 seperate zones in the building which should be individually controllable.
The Dali4Net comes standard with a Modbus TCP interface which could be integrated into Home Assistant which is great because it doesn’t need any converters in between.
The only concern I have for this at the moment is the scan_interval because the Modbus interface is a local polling.
So because I will be using dimmable led lights in the whole building I would like to create dimmers controlled through Home Assistant (with rotary encoders, have a few on an esp8266 at the moment) to controll the DALI lights by sending updated dimming levels to the different lights.
My question: Will I be able to dimm the lights fluently because of the scan_interval? Is the light level only updated every other second? Or half a second when lowering the interval?
To give a better insight in my setup, here is the layout what I’m after.
The Dali Master is the Dali4Net with up to 4 DALI lines, and a Modbus TCP over ethernet which connects straight into my switch.
Each DALI line gets its own stand alone 4 push button input module (or multiple) to make sure that the lighting will be controllable even when HA is down.
Secondary I have an input module with a multitude of input options.
Again, the main thing I’m after here is how to control the DALI lighting through Home Assistant using rotary encoders and get a smooth light intensity transition.
I don’t think MODBUS implementation in HA will be reliable enough for what you want to achieve.
As a thumb rule you should try to avoid multiple protocol conversions like Rotational Knob > Whatever protocol > HA > Modbus > TCPtoSerial > DALI > Lights.
Especially the Modbus part because that by design is a polling protocol (there’s a master which polls periodically the slaves which respond with values; intelligence is in the slaves, eg. requesting a light to dim would be equivalent to a button press telling the modbus device to start dimming from 100% to 0% during 2 seconds; a rotary knob would be possibe theoretically but the bus would be overflown with data during you rotate the knob, and guess what happens when you have 10 knobs rotating at once by 10 people) - in theory it should be possible but in reality it won’t work nicely.
scan_interval means just the interval of time HA polls the configured devices for their current status. This should be around 10 seconds. This is independent from execution of commands, those are done immediately (specific polls targeting write registers), but with bottlenecks due to python, network and conversion.
In my experience HA’s MODBUS integration is flaky and unreliable, I really doubt you’d get a smooth experience with it for this kind of usage. The way HA uses MODBUS is for polling an energy meter for example. Ask for the current energy every minute… Or just occasionaly switch a light on or off…
You should use DALI switches/control panels to handle physically the lights, not through HA.
Perhaps you should try to find a DALI gateway supporting MQTT, that’s way more flexible than MODBUS. Without bottlenecks - but question is what functionality is implemented in the gateway.
Best would be an ESPHome DALI support - that would give you native integration of DALI objects in HA without any protocol conversions.
Bits and pieces are there, just noone has done it yet:
Let me know how it goes. I’ve been trying out various spots lights and drivers for tunable white high hats and I’ve landed on Dali. It’s been hard in the US to find 120v cct drivers so it looks like I’m doing a 48v class 2 distribution system (using Romex) so if we ever sell the home it can be replaced with standard fixtures. Lunatone or sunricher DT-8 drivers and Goodlight or Environmental Lights for the spirits.
The challenge is getting all this into HA. I’ve considered Crestron, Lunatone and a few others. As of now I’ve been testing this “hub” from ATX led.
It’s a Dali controller with a built in emulated hue. So far it’s been working very reliably with HA. The only issue is if you issue a “group” command the group members take about 10 seconds to individually show their new state in the controller, I think this is a Dali issue not ATX and it’s not really a problem, just annoying. I don’t love using HUE so I’m looking at other options but as of now, this is the most promising. I’m going ahead with the lighting project and saving the gateway decision for last.
We are thinking of adding support for Home Assistant to our Hardware line. You could either use our KNX Bridge or SmartCore (both have a dedicated DALI Port). We support Apple HomeKit for now, and demonstrated a working Proof of Concept for Matter. With Matter one should be able to directly pair into Home Assistant once the support is coming. But the DALI devices need to be configured in our Webinterface. Otherwise one could write a Home Assistant integration (if anyones is willing to do that let me know, I will provide the hardware) so the devices could be configured in HA directly instead of our web interface.
EDIT 03. April 2024: Full support of DALI Lights (DT6, DT7, DT8) and DALI-2 Keypads via our Atios SmartCore and Atios KNX Bridge in Home Assistant. Pairing can be done via HomeKit or Matter, certified since October 2023.
This sounds great! I am working on a project where we need to integrate Dali lighting with a home assistant. Are you planning to have local API or cloud API? I am asking because it would be inconvenient if the internet is going down and we lose control of the lights
For the apple home, do you have any documentation available?
You can check our shop, and in the download section of the Atios KNX Bridge (which supports DALI natively as well) is the full documentation. Apple HomeKit is natively supported, matter will be supported soon (we demo’ed a working system at ISE in Barcelona a few weeks ago).
We are also planning to natively integrate into Home Assistant over a local API.
EDIT 03. April 2024: Full support of DALI Lights (DT6, DT7, DT8) and DALI-2 Keypads via our Atios SmartCore and Atios KNX Bridge in Home Assistant. Pairing can be done via HomeKit or Matter, certified since October 2023.
Full support of DALI Lights (DT6, DT7, DT8) and DALI-2 Keypads via our Atios SmartCore in Home Assistant. Pairing can be done via HomeKit or Matter, certified since October 2023.
Even though our alternative product Atios KNX Bridge supports DALI as well, we recommend to use Atios SmartCore. This includes 12x Relay outputs, that can be controlled with DALI buttons. And vice versa it has 12x binary inputs (8V DC to 230V AC) that can control DALI loads.
