I’ve recently switched out some old ZWave equipment with Inovelli Matter over Thread dimmers and fan controllers. Also added some other sensors and Level Locks. Everything seems to be pretty stable. All devices are first paired to Apple home and then shared to HA. I’m at 38 devices now. I have setup a ZBT-1 as a border router connected to my Apple created Thread network.
Wanted to hear other’s success stories. Apple home is there for scenes and a front end and HA runs the automations. Sometimes from a Thread device to a Zigbee device or a ZWave device. Even though this is showing Beta still it seems to be working well so far. It has been plug n play from my old ZWave stuff
I wonder if your Inovelli dimmers flicker. There are a few complaints about this on their community forum, and they have admitted that there is a hardware limitation causing this problem.
Not at all. In fact they’re way better than my old GE/Jasco dimmers that I replaced that did flicker. I had gotten used to that over the years. Using Fiet electric LEDs in can lights. Also have them on some halogen bulbs in fans and even some incandescent and I have only noticed them being smoother as dimmers. Wonder what types of bulbs they’re using that get the flicker
We are now having routine flickering across our network since a Matter server minor upgrade. I’m guessing that the server is causing some resubscribe events to occur more frequently, and thus leading us to more flickering events. What was previously a minor annoyance is now a major problem – most of the lights in our house will flicker at least twice or three times per day (that we notice). We need a fix for this pronto.
Hi @philip, this is something that I have discussed with the engineer, and it unfortunately is not an easy fix. They are out on Holiday until this weekend and I will raise the issue again. This was the response I got on my last inquiry about it:
This problem is very difficult to solve to be honest, we are a single-chip solution, that is, only one task can be processed at the same time, when entering NVM3 write/read, we need to disable the interrupt, so that it will not be able to jump to the dimming process in the appropriate time, which will lead to flicker. NVM3 reads/writes are called heavily during network restarts, which aggravates flicker frequency.
Your reply got me messing around with stuff today. I tend to agree with the CEO of Inovelli that this behavior may be based on Thread network quality and that they aren’t seeing this widespread in the thousands they have sold. I upgraded HA today and also installed a new POE switch so I dropped all access points. Rebooted HA multiple times and all HomePod minis and ATVs with Thread. I got one set of lights to do this flickering once. This was when the Apple Home Hub had to force itself to use a different hub than the one I chose due to all wifi APs being down. I have minis in nearly every room along with some Eve and Meross plug in MoT switches in rooms that don’t. So I feel like my thread network is pretty robust.
Anyways, it doesn’t seem to be an issue for me with HA with a ZBT-1 running the Thread firmware and joined to the previously existing Apple Home thread network.