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priiduonu / ihcclient

client for IHCServer
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Dimmable lights #1

Closed frmi closed 7 months ago

frmi commented 8 months ago

Hi

Thank you for this great project.

Do you have experience using this to integrate dimmable lights?

I am not familiar with IHC as such but i have managed to integrate it to Home Assistant following your guide, but the dimmable lights seems to be controlled by two outputs, as if i turn one on using using the IHCServer it acts as holding the physical contact.

priiduonu commented 7 months ago

Thank You for the kind feedback!

There are different dimmer modules used with IHC. I have the Dimmer 400 UNI modules in my system, driven by 24V output module in a 1-button configuration.

That means, as long as I am pressing the button, the 24V module will provide power for contact #1 of the dimmer unit and the brightness will rise or fall. When I release the button and press it down again, the brightness will change in the other direction.

When I toggle the button briefly, the light will turn on or off.

For a normal use you do not need more than that. But I found it inconvenient to toggle a single switch in HA to turn the lights on/off or turn it on for the right duration to change the brightness. Unfortunately HA does not have a "momentary" or "pulse" switch function as well as a "hold down" switch function. So I made custom script that can be used to "toggle" the lights on/off by providing power for contact #1 for 100 ms (should be less than 400 ms).

You can also turn the light off by providing a short pulse to contact #2.

Contacts #3 and #4 of the dimmer unit can be use as memory - a long pulse (more then 2 s) will save the current brightness level and a short pulse (less than 0.4 s) will recall it. So you can have 2 different levels saved and recalled.

The most annoying thing with (at least the old) IHC dimmer units is - you can not get any feedback if the lights are on or off and you can not set them to arbitrary level.

I think I will properly document my findings and provide the examples in the coming days :-)

priiduonu commented 7 months ago

@frmi - please take a look at the dimmer documentation and examples.

frmi commented 7 months ago

Hi @priiduonu,

Thank you for the documentation.

I have given it a read, and i have made it work turning on/off the lights 👍

I have the 350 CR dimmers, and i am unable to fetch the current state of the light. The IHC Server receives a sequence of On Off on the output. I need to read the documentation on these i guess :)

Have you experienced that the ihc server suddenly becomes unable to communicate with ihc controller?

priiduonu commented 7 months ago

  1. You can not get the dimmer status from the (older) IHC Controller. I do not know about new controllers/dimmers.

  2. I have successfully run the IHC Server (along with my IHC Client) 24/7 for 5+ years. Things to check:

Maybe completely irrelevant, but I experienced the following some time ago:

Note that my IHC Controller constantly flashes some leds (connected to 24V output module) with 0.5s interval, so there is always some traffic present.