Hi there, I was hoping someone could assist me with my Dynalite setup in Home Assistant. I have successfully added all the Dynalite lights in Home Assistant, but I have noticed anytime Home Assistant restarts, the Dynalite entities become unavailable.
It seems the only way to get the entities working again is to manually turn on the individual switches in my house from the wall so that Home Assistant can see them again.
Is this normal behaviour? Or do I need to change something in the settings? Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
This is normal behaviour. Home Assistant does not know the status of the lights after a restart, it learns the status upon the first change it receives. you can create a script to run on startup to call all channel levels on dynalite so you get all status on startup.
Over past week I’ve done a bit of testing, and I’m encountering a strange behaviour with certain lights where the states are not being updated in Home Assistant when controlled by the wall switch. However, there are some lights that do get the correct state updates even if controlled by the wall switch. There doesn’t seem to be a discernable pattern for why some lights work perfectly, and others don’t.
Have you, or anyone else experienced something similar?
Home Assistant and Dynalite noob here. I thought I’d just note my experiences with this integration and how I have connected to my Dynalite via a USR-DR320 RS485-Ethernet Bridge.
First off I bought this house with an existing Dynalite installation using Control4 as the CPU. I do not like the locked-in Control4 system so was keen to give Home Assistant a go.
First off I have no PDEG so I read this thread earlier about using the USR-DR320 so I bought one of those. I wired up an RJ45 cable to the connections of the USR-DR320. I used the specific pin-outs of the Dynalite box that I would be plugging into, a DDMC802 dynalite switch box. I may have read it incorrectly but different Dynalite boxes may have different pinouts for the RJ45 so I specifcally followed the DDMC802 documentation.
RJ45 Pin
DDMC802
Working USR-DR302
1
GND
G
2
GND
-
3
D+
A
4
D-
B
5
+12V
+
6
+12V
N/C
The only thing that I was confused by was the mistmatch of Data+ and Data- in the Dynalite doc needed to be swapped around to work on the USR end
So I have set up this integration to discover the events in the system, I went around the house clicking on every switch and I now have 76 new entities in my dynalite integration. Some of them are simple groups of lights and are controllable by Home Assistant. Many of them were Areas rather than lights and while the wall switch still does the action “Turn on the fire” or “Open the garage door” when I use the corresponding Home Asssistant entity it does nothing.
Anyway I will figure that out I guess. Thanks to the integration writer and the community as a whole.
I have done my discovery process and have a set of 76 entities in my Integration, many of these integrations work when first discovered. However on reboot of Home Assistant they all now show up as “Not provided” in the dynalight table of entities along with a red exclamation and circular arrow under status.
If I click on the entity I see “This entity is no longer being provided by the dynalite integration. If the entity is no longer in use, delete it in settings.”
I feel there is some concept I am probably not getting here. Can anyone provide any pointers?
If I use a switch or Control4 to turn a light on then it suddenly becomes available in Home Assistant.
Oh, I see, in an earlier post:
“This is normal behaviour. Home Assistant does not know the status of the lights after a restart, it learns the status upon the first change it receives. you can create a script to run on startup to call all channel levels on dynalite so you get all status on startup.”
For all of those who are struggling to sync state at startup/restart and channels state sync when it changes. Create an automation for every area you have like this example. If you have huge multiple areas, be mindful of the action delay you use when HA restart as it will be sending request channel levels at the same time to each and every area you create.
It seems Control4 is also using the same RS485 to Eternet and port number, that is why HA is being disconnected. you can verify your connection on ping if there is a timeout.
Some keypads are program to do channel levels to turn on/off lights and others are programs as area presets to turn on/off lights. So channel levels there is no feedback, but you can request channel level what is the state level and from that state make automation if On/100% then trigger switch entity on, if Off then trigger switch entity off.
For multiple lights in one area, it will also help if you create a group of lights in the helper if you have multiple lights on one area. these will help what is the state of the group of lights state. So if group of lights is On/100% then trigger switch entity on and if group of lights is Off then trigger switch entity Off. these will sync your keypad feedback.
My philips dynalite integration still works on updating the state.
i have to divert back to eternet lan connection from wifi connection, since i found out that wifi connection keeps on disconnecting and having timeouts over wifi.
i have also remove time clock based to restart the host every early morning, instead i just use that to only reload the philips dynalite integration entries only and not the host.
testing it for a weeks now and state still works…
