Zooz Zen32 and smart ceiling fan speed control?

Hi all - first time post, I’ve been using HA for 2 years now following the Insteon problems. I live in Bermuda and it’s pretty hot in the summer so I have ceiling fans in each room that are not wired to a wall switch (old house) - they are hard wired in the ceiling and intended to be controlled by the pull chains.

For years I’ve been using Insteon fanlincs and their 6 button scene controllers which worked great. I’m trying to get rid of the insteon gear since I know the controller is going to fail eventually - I’m down to fanlincs to be replaced now, most likely by the Sonoff wifi fan controllers.

My question is on the Zen32. I’ve been using them to control the fanlincs and they work pretty well, but coming from Insteon I’ve been trying to emulate how that worked.

Right now I have an automation that triggers when the bottom 4 buttons are pushed to set the fan speed. Generally that works fine.

The main issue I’m having is syncing the scene button led states to the fan speed. I’d like this to behave how insteon did, ie., “Low” is pushed and the other button LEDs turn off. The scene controller would then show the current speed by which button LED is on.

I sort of have this working with two methods (testing) - one is an automation that calls a script "sync the zen32 button LEDs) and turns on the active button LED and turns off the others. Works most of the time.

Two is that I tried creating a scene for each fan speed “state”, ie., “Low” scene sets the Zen32 “Low” button LED to on and the other 3 LEDs off. The correct scene is activated with another automation triggered by button pushes. Again, works most of the time.

Does anyone have any thoughts on the best method for this? Other options? Thanks for your help!

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Interesting use of the Z32.

I have a zen32 in most of my rooms and use them for various things. Like the one in the master opens blinds or sets scenes or flips through modes.

What you describe Should work, what I’ve found with mine. The leds are unfortunately pretty slow. I also used to have a big problem with ZWave latency (had lots of S0 stuff) and whencongestik happened the first thing to go was the led colors (signals lost on the way dunno. Never chased it)

I ended up splitting the triggers from the indicatorsbin automations. What that means is I don’t fool with the led status in any automation. Don’t care. Fire and forget.

I have a NR flow for each Z32 that watches the relevant ‘stuff’ and periodically updates the status as necessary.

So for instance the button that controls the blinds in my master… Press toggles and various press and hold combos do things like open, close, open all, close all, open left, etc.

The led module watches the state of the blinds and pops the leds in parallel. So if I open the blinds (no matter where from) the led will see the state change on the blinds it’s watching, do whatever calculations are necessary to determine color then send the color.

By doing this you can also throttle the writes too

I have another automation that runs every 15 minutes that ‘refreshes’ and in the refresh routine I tell the flow that updates each Z32 tondo thier thing and set. Which effectively makes the leds match what is reality just in case something got out of sync.

Now there are exceptions. I have one button that ‘locks’ something in a room and I need feedback that it’s locked immediately so in THAT button press automation I do handle sending the red. But then I also added it to the button manager that is in turn refreshed. Etc.

Best part is no matter what sends the automation the lights always end up the right way.

Thanks Nathan - I assume you mean node red which I haven’y played with at all. Have to start watching some vids.

I originally did something similar with the insteon 6 button scene controllers in HA. I had an automation which was triggered by “any change to the fan motor speed” and would set the button LEDs correctly.

What’s the benefit of node red over automations?

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You can do it in either. Each has pro’s and cons. The builtin stuff honestly has better tracing. NR allows more complexity for how I like to work. Mostly because I have some pretty complex room management code that loops back on itself it’s just easier to visualize that way.

This is a room: (no i wont publish this one it’s a wonderful bowl off spaghetti that need a lot of work first…)

this is one of the Z32sa