 Don't you hate it when you shelled extra money to get a worse experience? Well, honestly, that's how I've felt about these and Bright and Smart Motion Dimmers, because GE in their infinite wisdom ships them out of the box with all of the motion sensors, not only active, but instantly active, so you can run into situations, see that, where you go to turn off a light, walk away from it, and as you're moving away, the bloody thing turns back on, because, and this is a feature, not a bug, they have a 180 degree motion sensing radius. Thankfully, because these are Z-Wave devices, we have the solution. We should, by the end of this video, be able to reconfigure these smart switches to disable the fade on and off functionality that I personally find kind of annoying, set up remote control, including voice control, create groupings, so that multiple zones can be turned on and off at the same time with a single command, and decouple the motion sensing from the light switch functionality, so that it could potentially be used for other automations and not for the lights in areas where that would be pretty annoying, like the bedroom. You know, you roll over to get more comfortable, light goes on, it's not great. I've had to paper over every bedroom light switch, just like I'm papering over this segue to our sponsor. Zoho Desk, over 50,000 businesses worldwide trust Zoho's context-aware help desk to improve productivity and ensure their customers are kept happy. Get 50% off your annual subscription with the code ZDesk50 at the link below. (*upbeat music*) Our story begins today in the server room, where these motion sensing light switches have actually been amazing. There are parts of the house where I'm not gonna wanna disable that functionality, like bathrooms, hallways, and utility spaces, like this one and the garage. But we definitely need to fine tune the behavior a little bit, because the way it is now, where it only stays on for a couple of minutes, and then the second it turns off, it's active again, means that I will oftentimes try to turn off the light, and in walking away from it, have the bloody thing turn back on. It's a motion sensor, you don't have to shut it off. Fortunately, Jake has the solution, and it is a Raspberry Pi, where did it go? I have no idea, I've been trying to find it. Where did you put it? You moved it. I didn't move it, it was just chilling here. He is such a liar. Yeah, but it was still like here or somewhere. No, you moved it, you used a different ethernet. Oh, I know where it is, I know! It's in the land center, hopefully. There it is, I should know that, because I put it there. Now the role of a Raspberry Pi in this situation is just a stand-in to run Home Assistant, which is like the piece of software that's gonna tell, hey, light switch, do that thing. Other light switch, do that thing. Air conditioner, do that thing. Yeah, light switches work together. The intention long-term is for that to go on your NAS. As like a Docker container or something? Yeah, sort of. It runs as a VM, because it runs its own Docker containers. That's like the plugins in Home Assistant, it's pretty cool, mind-blown. But for now, it's on a Raspberry Pi. I can't connect to it though, for some reason. Did you unplug anything in there? Not that I know of. Hey look, we're in business! Nice. We have one device already adopted, and it's that one. Oh, that's why that one doesn't dim on and off. Did you change it? No, that's just because this light fixture doesn't dim. But we can go in here. Here, look at this. Eh, eh, eh. There's like no delay. That's actually pretty awesome. There's a vacancy mode, so I guess you can turn on the light when somebody leaves? That doesn't make sense. You would want it on when nobody's there. When no motion. It's clearly a lot for us to learn about these. I'm glad we bought a hundred of them. Let's go vacancy mode. Okay. Okay. Let's walk out. Here we go. And then, so what, theoretically in five seconds, it'll turn on? Something like that. Nope. Okay. Well, definitely more research required into what that value does. What else we got here? Enable and disable whether motion sensor only turns on if the room is dark. Oh. See, I was thinking. For the bathroom. Yeah, and I was thinking, Jake, remember how I was like, hey, we should make it so that it's tied into a light sensor outside or the time of day. And hold on, hold on. And if I press the switch, it actually opens up a smart blind instead of turning on the light. But this is a way simpler way to do that. Yeah. So basically you would just have like in the bathrooms probably, if it's the middle of the day and the blinds are open and it's like searingly bright, you don't need to turn the light on. Oh, that's great. Yeah. You can, oh, invert switch. So if you have a- In case they installed them upside down, it's too late. No, no, no, no, no. No, it's for three-way switches. Well, there's a three-way right here. Yeah, I got the other side of this three-way. Where's the main? Is this the main then? Wait, what? Yes, it is. Well, there's three light switches within one, two, three, four, five steps for the same lights. Why don't we adopt this switch? Okay. Or why don't we do the theater room first? Cause that's the one that's been bothering me the most. Cause the lights just turn on in the middle of a movie. I've had to tape over those ones. I'm pretty sure when I started the inclusion, all you have to do is click the light switch. Okay. Which one are you gonna do? I'm gonna do the overhead one, not the sconces. Okay, so I'll set the location to theater room. Oh, theater room overhead. Oh, wait. And this will be overhead. Yeah, there you go, done. Seriously? I can't believe how fast that is. Z-Wave is great. And especially once we have like 100, 150 devices, it will work really well. Now what we're probably gonna have to do is once they're all adopted, we're gonna have to go and say, heal the network, which basically tells every single device to find the best routes to other devices. And with that many devices, it might take like a day to do. Shut up. I don't know, I haven't tried it. I know at my house with like five or 10 devices, it takes like 10 minutes. So. Oh, wow. Okay. It could take a while. Let's see if it scales linearly or exponentially. But you only have to do that once. With the motion sensitivity low, could I make my way back to my seat? No. Okay then. Hmm. Vacancy light turns on manually and off automatically without motion. Oh. And see. Okay, hold on. If we turn off one of these. Yeah. Maybe the reset level like figured itself out now. Nope. Frick. That's kind of a problem. You only spent $10,000 on these light switches. Okay. Tell me the name of a switch, Dan. Let's go rec room. Okay. Rec room. Get wrecked. Okay. Can you hit the rec room switch please, Dan? Whatever one you hit. Oh crap. Is that one. What did you press? Stairs. Yeah. So location. What's a location for a stair? Basement? Yeah, but there's two stairs to the basement. Oh, I guess there's basement, stairs and upstairs. Oh, right. There's two stairs. So the switch is in the basement. Basement stairs. The switch is also up there. Oh wait, but that's what. Wait, why did we put the motion sense? Oh, I guess that kind of makes sense. Well, no, there's supposed to be motion on both sides. No, there isn't. Why? It's not a thing. Why not? Because it's not a thing. What do you mean it's not a thing? It's not a thing. That's not how they work. You keep saying it's not a thing, but what do you mean? That's not how they work. Why can't you have a motion on both sides? I don't know. Maybe you could. No, what are you talking about? Cause there's two motions on the, the one in the hallway over there. Oh, that's a normal one. Oh, okay. I am wrong. That's the one for these ones. Yeah. No, I'm wrong. It's just the one here. Wait. Yeah. This one's the main one. I know what we can do. We move the motion sensing one to the top of the stairs. And then we use the motion sensor from one of these other spaces where we don't want motion control. Right. So we can control these lights from the bottom of the stairs. Right? Yeah. Theoretically. That would be awesome. Okay. Well, sure we can do that, but for now, for now I need to name this switch, which is, so what is it? Location, rec room stairs. Cause these are the stairs into the rec room. Oh God. I know these are things that I can change anytime I want, but come on, you guys get this, right? Once you set it, you're never going to touch it again. So there's this pressure to get it right. If it's location rec room, that's where it is. And the name is front stairs. I think that's fine. What if you move that switch up there? Well, then I'll move it. Man, this whole turn back on immediately thing is kind of a problem. I've seen online that apparently there is firmware updates for these, but they release them through like public hubs. Like if you had a Samsung, like smart things kind of hub, you can get the updates through that, but it doesn't seem like there's a download site. So maybe we can contact them. Oh, that's so much better. The dim though, the speed, oh, that's much better. I do wish you could just shut it off, but. Yeah, you can enable plane switch functionality. Actually, we need to do that. Let's go do it. My son wanted RGB lighting in his room, which I was like, yeah, sure, no problem. Let's just grab these Yeelight V2s that we had kicking around at the office anyway, and we'll set you up with these. Cool, right? App control, you can change the colors. There's your sunrise. One small problem. Why you gotta be like that? I had a step stool. I was ready to go. Where's the other one? Well, it's in there. Oh. Yeah, cause I wanted to get something working from temporary. Anyway, the point is, can no work. Oh, does that bulb work in there though? At all. Oh yeah. It's pretty typical for you to have to choose. Do you want smart bulbs or you want smart switches? Now, I wanted the motion sensors everywhere because who knows what kind of cool things we might wanna do with motion down the line, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I want every single switch to operate as a smart switch. So we set it to dumb switch mode. Yeah. Think it's gonna work? Off. No dice. How do you know? Time for our classic do as I say, not as I do moment. Wow. Let's find out if it's hooked up. Yeah, that's very silly of you. Theoretically, yes. All of that looks quite hooked up. What are you doing? I am fixing it. Oh, do you know why it's? The electrician said that there's a couple of light switches that are not working. And he thinks it's because the apprentice screwed it up. I guess I should probably hit the breaker for this. Electricians usually don't. I am not an electrician. Oh my gosh. What? What? Hello. Give her full sends only bud. No, I don't wanna break it. Full sends only bud. Oh, that sucks. I think I need to take the other one out too. Can I steal your cat? That sucks. No, you cannot steal my cat. Can I bring Arlo here? I really like my cat. You're more than welcome to bring Arlo over. That would be fun actually. I play date. Yeah. So this is not right. Don't do that. Oh, what the actual bananas. So it is hooked up right. I wonder if it just got kind of mangled when they pushed it in. And it just like broke the copper. Yeah. Whoa, that was not actually an easy place to catch something. Smart guy. Maybe it doesn't dim anymore. Well, that's what it should be. That's what we want. Right. Yeah, the dimmer is not working. Confirmed. Cool, but it still tries to do the. It still fades on and off. Oh, GE. You got to have a way to disable that. There's lots of bulbs that don't behave nicely, even with LED and CFL compatible dimmers. So then hold on. Other than flickering a little bit when it first turns on, is that a problem? Well, that might cause it to reset every time you. Oh, it flickers quite a bit. That's true. If you turn this on and off, I believe it's five times. It goes into like a reset state. So let me, let's just see. Let's just see. Because, oh, actually no, Jake, it's not going to do it. The Yeelight wants two seconds in between each change of state for the reset. So maybe it's fine. Oh, hey, oh, oh, oh, oh, okay. Is it dimmed right now? They turned it up. Oh, yes. There, now we have a regular bulb that can tell us what the crap the fixture is doing. So it's supposed to be on. Okay, here we go. It's not turning off. The switch is clearly not working. Wait, it turned up. Okay, the switch is working again. Can there something very wrong with this light switch? What is even happening right now? I disabled the motion sensor. So why don't we see if it's disabled? Sure, feel free. Let's give it a try. Exposed light switch. Do do. Okay, that is so stupid. Gee, I wonder why not everyone is super into smart home stuff. Okay, manually mode. Manually mode? Or sorry, manual mode. I'm looking at the modes. Occupancy mode, turn on when motion detected, turn off. Manual mode, manual from the front panel of the in wall smart dimmer. Promote the Z-Wave controller. Huh? Did we manage to disable the motion sensor on any of them? We'll go check that other one, the closet, because that one's disabled. I'll go check. Okay, no, it's, no, it's still, the motion sensor's still turning it on. So what happens if they all suck and it never works? You have to change it on a hundred switches. Oh. Okay. Maybe we should just for shits, why don't we try and shut the breaker off and turn it back on? Maybe it needs a hard reset. I don't know why, but maybe. Okay, hold on, here's, oh, we can't disable the motion. Oh. Oh. Okay, if we can't disable the motion sensor, this is really gonna be a problem. We should see if we can turn off the motion in the one in the mechanical room. Are you still down there? Yep. Okay, I'm gonna turn off the motion in the mechanical room one. Sure. The motion is off. Really? Yeah. Seriously, although that is a different model of switch, the firmware on that one is 5.39 and the firmware on all of these motion dimmers is 5.32. So I'm kind of feeling like there was a bug and they updated it and I just don't know how we're gonna get the firmware for these ones. Maybe we have to buy a, like a Samsung SmartThings hub and just hook them all up to that so they'll update. This is terrifying. There's a home assistant thread here about GE, Jasco switches where people are just like, yeah, yeah, it's really bad. There's basically no way to update the firmware. So if anyone in the audience works for GE or Jasco, please help us. Yeah, you guys actually suck. Not releasing firmware updates because especially if you, especially if you make the firmware and then won't give it to people. Yeah, like actually you, this thread just makes me so angry. It's just people complaining about the same kind of basic stuff that we want to do. Like, no, I just want it to just immediately switch on or immediately switch off. Stuff that like a good software engineer could do in an afternoon. Also, why are we buying inventory with ancient firmware on it? Especially for a product where you can't update it. Okay, so Garth on live chat says he's gonna see if he can find something for us. Unbelievable. It'll be a lot cheaper for them to just put up a support page with firmware downloads. That would be way cheaper. The stupidest thing is that Home Assistant even has an interface for pushing, oh, where is it? You can just, you can totally, you can totally, you can totally, you can totally, you can totally, you can totally, you can totally, it's a thing. Yeah, there. You just have to select a file and update it. Yeah. Cause these guys say his firmware is 5.54. We're on like 5.32. I know. No, no, there's way newer firmwares. Should we buy? Where can we get one of those like smart things? No, no, that's a bad solution. Because then if there's a future update, what am I gonna do? I'm gonna un-pair it to the fricking Home Assistant. Well, you don't necessarily need to do that. All 100 of them, right? Then I put them all back on the Samsung SmartSafe. And reconfigure them all. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, you provide firmware updates. That's it. I will fly there, Jake. Will you? I will fly there. I guess it's a video. Oh yeah. It's not like they're gonna come outside. Garth is gonna help us out. I feel it. Garth is typing. Oh Garth. Please Garth, come through for us. Garth help us all. There is not really a manual mode on the switches. It should just go ahead and turn the lights on and off. Yes, there is. Garth might be an actual NPC. Okay, do they have a phone line? We'll let Garth try to help us in the meantime. Yeah. Call technical support. If Spanish is what it will take to get a firmware update out of these guys, we can talk to Serge. He sort of knows Spanish. Man, I can feel my blood pressure rising. Like stuff like this, man, it just makes me so angry. Here's an idea. For the ones we don't want to have motion, we could paint the motion sensor. That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. It's the stupidest thing you've ever heard, but it doesn't involve. Yeah, but the other functionality doesn't update. I know, I know. No, we actually just need them to work. I know, I know. Since we're on the subject of things that make me angry, if you've got hold music, fine, have hold music. Never have a prerecorded voice come back and say, hi, are you okay to still be holding right now? Or whatever the fuck it's saying. Because I'm like, oh, what, what? It's that again. Just have music so that I know when to come back to it. This is the soundtrack of my personal hell. Oh, fuck. After four of my, yes, I'm here, Garth has said he's still here. He's just waiting for a reply because he has no fucking idea clearly because it's so fucking stupid. How has nobody ever, how is this not just like something they deal with every other day? Yeah. That I don't really understand. LTTstore.com. Buy a few water bottles so he can pay for this fucking disaster. It's a lot of water bottles, boys. All right, and how can I assist you today, Linus? I have some GE and Brighton switches and basically they're running a mishmash of different firmwares and there's no obvious way to update the firmware. Okay, so the firmware on the devices is updated through your hub. There isn't any outside way of updating the firmware other than with the hub. Right, so I'm using a Home Assistant server to run it. So I need the firmware file so that I can upload it to the switch. Okay, so unfortunately we don't give out that information. It's all done through the hub. Right, so that's my hub and that's the way that my hub requires it to be done. It's my device, like I bought it. I need the firmware file for it. We don't have those available. Okay, so then what? Your hub support, your hub support would do that. Okay, so hold on. So do you guys are, this is Jasco, right? That is correct. Okay, so you guys make the switch for GE? That is correct. Including the firmware? That is correct. Cool, okay, so that firmware, I need it. I'm gonna have to say, again, unfortunately. No, it's not fortune. No, no, I don't want you to use the word unfortunately because it's not fortune. This is not chance. This is you guys deciding not to provide a customer for your product with a firmware update when the functionality of it is fundamentally broken right now. I can't even disable the motion sensors on these things. So what I need is to, unfortunately, you guys send me the firmware files. So am I able to get the firmware from Aotech? Because they're the ones who make the Z-Wave stick that I'm using. Yes, that is who you would get a hold of. Why? Because they are the ones that the, evidently if you've got an Aotech stick, then they are the ones that would have the support to be able to update or add, change your firmware. But you guys make the switch. That is correct. And you guys write the firmware. That is correct, but we do not give it out. That is a proprietary information that is only handed out through the hub. Well, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life. Thank you very much. You're very welcome. Have a. Oh, Jasco, you. So I emailed Aotech. It's possible they might be able to save the day. Garth could still come through for us. Garth's not gonna come through. Clearly their policy is to withhold critical updates from their customers. It's proprietary. No, it's not. Unbelievable. Where's the, okay. He said, try pushing the configuration button with the on and off button at the same time. Where is the configuration? What the hell is he talking about? I mean, if this puts it in manual mode, this will at least solve the problem for now. Oh my God. That is not the solution though. Well, I agree. I'm just saying if it works right now. Yeah, I found it, Jake. It's right here. Yeah, that's why I was clicking, but it's not working. They want you to take every wall plate off to do this. I seriously don't remember the last time I was this enraged. Okay, there we go. Hold on. It blinked three times. Holy it worked. I know it's awful. You don't need to do it on all of them, but for now at least. I can go around and take the plates off of every switch in the house that I want running in manual mode. I'm not saying it's a good thing. I'm just trying to help you for now until AOTech will come save this video. Faster to put tape over top. This video was supposed to be, Hey G and Brighton switches by Jasco. Cool product. We'd love to use it and show how cool it is. It turned into, you can go yourself. Like honestly, I just want to rip every single one of them out of the wall regardless. As someone who bought this product and went and installed it in my home, my recourse is someone in some other time zone when Jasco has the firmware, but it's just like, we won't give it to you. No. Oh my God. Oh, oh my God. You know what Garth just told me? I asked him, where can we find the rest of these config options like holding the switch? He found them on YouTube. This is literally their customer service. This is just a basic product overview. Why were we expecting Garth to save the day exactly? Firmware is updated through the hub. So you may contact them to see if it's updated. Oh my God. No, firmware is updated through you having a firmware download page. To what end? Jasco, to what end? What are you trying to accomplish? They don't want the proprietary Z-Wave firmware stolen. You know, it's very high tech. By who? Definitely not an open standard. My question is if AyoTech is supposed to have the firmware updates, then shouldn't they just propagate? Well, cause I don't think the stick is meant to push firmware updates. Or you just mean AyoTech makes a hub so they might be able to provide it. The stick is the DIY approach, right? It just allows you to integrate Z-Wave with whatever thing. In this instance, we're integrating with Home Assistant. They also make a hub. So I'm thinking maybe if Jasco just gives them the firmware to distribute it, maybe they just have it and they can just give it to us to update with the Z-Stick. Well, if Jasco won't send out the firmware to the public, then I'm sure whatever agreement they have with AyoTech doesn't allow them to send it out to the public. I also said as an alternative option, they could send us a hub to see, but- That is so stupid. I would rather take them out. I'd rather take them out, put them in a box and fly to Jasco's HQ and throw them in their face. Honestly, I think all we can really do is say to be continued, ladies and gentlemen. At the end of that day, I was understandably very frustrated. I had just spent $10,000 on product alone switches that we could not reliably put in manual mode, adjust the motion cool down of, or disable the fade in and fade out on. Adding insult to injury, they outright refused to provide any firmware updates that at the time we believed could have solved my problems, which is an enormous no-no in my books. I shared the experiences that both myself and others in the smart home community had gone through on the WAN show. And to our surprise, Jasco actually reached out pretty much immediately. So we pushed for them to provide firmware update files, not just for us, but also to the rest of the community. After a few emails back and forth, we ended up on the phone with some of the higher ups at Jasco and the product manager we were speaking with insisted that version 5.50 is the only firmware they've ever released for the MotionDimmer, which was very confusing to me because as you might recall, our switches reported version 5.32. They eventually figured out that when the MotionDimmer was submitted for certification to the Z-Wave Alliance, they had accidentally entered the firmware version in decimal form when the form asked for hexadecimal. This means the 32 of 5.32 got converted from hexadecimal as 50. That means my switches were indeed on the latest firmware, which meant there had to be something else going on or the original firmware was just buggy. Now, within a Z-Wave network, when you adopt or include a device, it's given a unique ID number starting from one. And what we found was that when adopting more of the switches, certain switches would adopt the same device ID as another existing switch. And in turn, Z-Wave JS, the application that runs within Home Assistant to manage the network would crash. And after a reboot, only the originally adopted switch would show in the list. So in the video, we were trying to edit the configuration of a switch in my son's bedroom. As it turns out, that switch had the same ID as one downstairs in the rec room hallway. As you might've guessed, these configuration changes were actually applying to the downstairs switch instead, even though we hadn't yet adopted it into the network. We don't know exactly why this was happening, but apparently weird issues like this were common in the earlier days of Z-Wave. And since these switches are based on a several year old design, I think they said six, it could explain why they're particularly prone to it. After we realized this, we were able to exclude both of those switches, then re-adopt them one by one, and we were finally able to disable the motion sensors. With that said, we still can't disable the fade in and out or tweak the motion cool down. So maybe new firmware is actually needed, or maybe I'll still need to switch to a different solution. First, we need to talk about the elephant in the room, firmware updates. For a product like this, especially in an industry that's changing so rapidly, being able to update your firmware is a huge deal. And no, go through your hub's proprietary update system that your hub might not even have, because it's actually a stick and not a hub, is not an appropriate answer for a product that is designed to be used in an open ecosystem. So in my call with Jasco, they said they would provide me with the firmware files and figure out a solution for sharing them publicly. And I'm happy to report that as of just two weeks from sharing my issues, Jasco has already followed through. The files for 12 of their most popular products are now available on GitHub and on their support site with the rest to follow shortly. So we did it, Reddit. And also thank you, Jasco, for taking my admittedly not very level-headed criticism and turning it into a W. As for what's gonna happen with my house, that's still up in the air. If we can't fix the above-mentioned remaining issues with the Jasco switches, I might still have to pull them out and go with a different solution. Inovelli has pitched working with us to develop their own motion switch. And we've also looked into hardwiring motion sensors, actually multi-sensors, into each area where we need motion, which would give us a lot of really cool options for automations. Let us know in the comments if you have a preferred solution that you'd like to see. Any brilliant ideas? Brilliant? 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If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe you'll enjoy, let's say the home theater episode. That was a really fun one. A little more positive. A little more, yeah, a little more positive. Massive shout out Valencia, those seats are amazing. Not enough love for the seats made it into the edit. They're amazing.