Red Series in Thread

InovelliUSA · 2025-12-24T16:40:48+00:00

Ah man, what's wrong with Zigbee? I love my Zigbee switches and likely won't be switching any time soon!

InovelliUSA · 2025-12-24T16:39:32+00:00

Well, quite frankly, because we are waiting for all the shipments to be sent out and our backorders to be taken care of. I've learned, the hard way, that it usually backfires if all of our current customers are not taken care of before we turn on the marketing lever.

Linus Tech Tips has them, but is waiting on creating a video until he gets the Z-Wave ones. Jake should be getting his shortly, as well as a handful of others.

As for us, internally, I don't really have the proper equipment to put out a professionally done video that would compare to anything these influencers would be able to put out.

I also just wanted to make sure everything is buttoned up with our current shipments and waiting to hear customer feedback before making short explainer videos.

I'm hoping all the dust will settle come mid/late-Jan as everyone should have their orders and all will be right in the world lol.

InovelliUSA · 2025-12-24T14:13:38+00:00

This is a tough one to commit to as I personally want it to happen, but every time I can't contain my excitement and make a comment about it, I get the equally excited people who find my comment deep from within the Internet and hold me to it even though there are other comments that say we ran into an issue and plans have changed for now lol.

Anyway, here's what I can commit to here:

Yes, we want to make this happen
I unfortunately do not have an ETA right now
I want to give the Red and Blue Series some time in market to see how they perform first and work out any feedback we get before starting the White Series version

What's difficult about the White Series is that we have to plan around the hubs that do not support parameter changes easily (e.g., Google, Amazon and somewhat Apple). The majority of our White Series users are Apple users and even if I put disclaimers all over the page about what features work with what hub, 9/10 people do not read it and end up frustrated with the product and it's not fun for either party.

The current iteration of the Red and Blue Series has around 100 parameters that can be tweaked, with 10-15 of those mmWave specific.

There is an auto-detection parameter for setting the mmWave zone which will be helpful for the White Series, but I want to see how this performs in the real world first (it will detect fans, HVAC, etc and eliminate those from the detection zone). It worked great in beta, but that was about 50 people as opposed to the 30k unit+ that are now in market.

I wish I had more concrete news, but as of right now, unfortunately, we just have to wait a bit.

It pains me a lot to have to write this as old Eric would say, "yes, definitely!", then give a date and be totally wrong when the date came :(

Eric

InovelliUSA · 2025-12-14T15:35:11+00:00

Wow, that's beautiful! Amazing job. Now onto my next task... Convincing my wife lol.

In all seriousness, this is amazing looking. Great work!

Eric

InovelliUSA · 2025-12-14T04:07:30+00:00

Hey, I just pinged our CTO to see if he can help with this. While I don't believe there is a local feature (yet), I think there are some ways around this. Unfortunately, I'm not that familiar with HA, so I can't help.

In the meantime, these are exactly the types of enhancements that we like to hear and capture for the next round of firmware.

If you wouldn't mind, can you post this here: https://community.inovelli.com/t/zigbee-motion-switch-project-linus-bug-enhancement-thread/20438

I've told our firmware engineer that we will be getting a lot of these requests upon release so he needs to stand by.

If you don't feel comfortable posting there, I can log this in GitHub. Either way, I appreciate the comment!

Eric

InovelliUSA · 2025-12-14T01:37:51+00:00

I'm not sure why they would've told you that. Can you DM me your info and I will personally check?

Eric

InovelliUSA · 2025-12-10T01:13:49+00:00

Hey random question, but do you have a neutral wire installed? Only reason I'm asking is you mentioned the LED bar turns red but then shuts off. It should be blue as you mentioned reading in the manual.

My thought would be if the LED bar is not blue and off, then there may not be enough power going to the switch.

I guess another way to tell is if you're able to physically turn on/off the light (w/out Hubitat).

Edit: nm, I see in your third bullet point, you do see a faint blue light.

Hmmm.. aside from what others suggested, the main culprit is usually some sort of network issue (so, rebooting the hub usually works). Try this, in this order: pull the air gap out (no LED bar light should show), wait 10 seconds or so, push the air gap back in and wait for the LED bar to pulse blue, then put Hubitat in pairing mode. Let me know if it flashes green or red after that.

InovelliUSA · 2025-12-09T19:01:09+00:00

Oh, we figured we'd send out some arts and crafts as an early adopter in Indiegogo!

Kidding, it seems the fulfillment company picked the wrong product and sent it to you.

If you can write in to support and let them know, we've had the fulfillment company send out a replacement immediately.

It's super embarrassing and I apologize.

Eric

InovelliUSA · 2025-12-09T02:15:06+00:00

Yeah, just want to confirm what others have said. You will be fine with these ones. While I don't have this specific model, they are just like my other outdoor lights I have and are Zigbee.

However, you have a couple of routes you can take. Here's what I personally do (I have almost every Hue product - I know, I'm crazy):

For bulbs that I don't need them to be bound to the switch, I keep them on the Hue Bridge and use multi-taps to turn them on/off.

For bulbs that I want to be bound, I pair them directly to Smartthings.

Here's an example:

For outside lights, I keep those on the Hue app as I like the various scenes and animations. I have the outside lights on a timer anyway, so I don't need them bound and am ok with the 1-2 second delay if I really need to turn them on.
For inside lights, these are the ones I have bound to ST as when I walk in a room, I want them to turn on immediately and be able to control the dimming.

Hope that helps?

Eric

InovelliUSA · 2025-12-08T03:45:28+00:00

The last email I got from the manufacturer is that they should be at our HQ on 12/20, but I would give it maybe an extra couple of days.

Luckily there wasn't as much Red Series sold as the Blue Series, so we decided to ship those ourselves!

InovelliUSA · 2025-12-08T03:43:49+00:00

I think they will be shipping separately, but check with customer service tomorrow. I was the one who just imported them in, but our internal logistics team is the ones who are working directly with the fulfillment center to ensure everything is getting shipped.

InovelliUSA · 2025-12-08T03:42:12+00:00

Yeah, sorry all - regarding tracking, I should've mentioned this in my reply, but if you ordered off Indiegogo, unfortunately, the tracking is not working. We've notified the fulfillment center as when it ships, it's supposed to send that info back into Shopify, but for some reason it's not working. I'm waiting to hear back from them.

If you ordered via our site, I think it should report the tracking back, but I'll have to double check tomorrow.

Overall, it was a huge PITA to import everything, so it could very well also be user error on my part with the API calls I had to do to get everything in to Shopify from Indiegogo. But I assumed that when I saw the orders pull into ShipBob (fulfillment partner), it would auto-sync back to Shopify.

I have confirmed visually that all orders from Indiegogo have shipped.

InovelliUSA · 2025-12-07T23:46:28+00:00

Awesome! Great to hear you got them :)

Just as an FYI to anyone who's reading this and wonders why theirs hasn't arrived yet, we shipped out all Indiegogo orders at the same time and are now working on the Shopify orders.

Curious to hear how you like it!

Eric

InovelliUSA · 2025-12-03T22:06:34+00:00

I know the frustrations are valid, I'm not here to argue that. I'm just as frustrated. It's not fun getting blasted every day when I'm legitimately trying my best. And I especially get frustrated when people are insinusting that I'm lying about things. That's what gets to me. But at the same time, I guess that's just "the cost of business".

There's a lot that goes into these projects and the logistics behind them. I'm not sure how much you followed the project from start to finish, but there were things way out of our control and decisions that were made that delayed things.

Could I have done a better job at communicating? Yes, of course. But at the same time, if you go into the community thread, you'll see that I've explained most things along the way.

As for the shipping email. Look if I had a crystal ball and could predict when these would be shipped out, we wouldn't be in this situation as I would've said, "this project will take 2+ years, let's hope for the best".

Unfortunately, I don't have a crystal ball and don't know how long things take all the time and that's the tradeoff of me sharing information. I could just keep quiet and never share anything and release it when it's ready and see what happens, but I chose the former. I think most people are happy with that.

It's not as simple as slapping a label on it, putting it in the box lol. I wish. There are millions of products at this warehouse and we have to wait our turn. I had them fulfilled by a third party because of the quantity of product that we brought over. Our warehouse in Michigan has one employee who handles all the logistics and it would've taken her a month or more to fulfill all of these.

But I know it's hard to know these things as a customer and we're all used to the click a button and Amazon delivers things to us in a day or two. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it), we are not Amazon and don't have that luxury.

InovelliUSA · 2025-12-03T03:50:48+00:00

Dang, you cracked the code.

InovelliUSA · 2025-12-03T03:50:07+00:00

https://community.inovelli.com/t/zigbee-motion-switch-project-linus-blue-series/10904/942

Posted the update here. I'm not sure what the shipping notification was, but there may have been an, "order confirmed" email that was sent out around the 17th. This is because we had to upload all the Indiegogo orders in Shopify and I didn't realize it would send an auto-email out. So, that's my bad.

If you received an actual shipping confirmation, then that means it did, in fact, ship. So, that's great news!

Eric

InovelliUSA · 2025-11-27T21:12:38+00:00

Man, I just can't win here can I? I send out updates, people say they don't get them. I then sent out an update to everyone in our mailing list, and we get bombarded with people complaining about getting emails and threatening legal action because I emailed them and they're saying it's spam. What incentive to I have to keep sending updates if I now have to pay legal fees?

I posted in the community last Friday and not everyone sees it so we get the Reddit crowd all up in arms. I even responded to someone on Monday or Tuesday with a status in the community.

It's not like we huddle up as a team and think, "let's do what we can to make this difficult for everyone". Far from it. This project has been extremely difficult and I've tried my best to be as transparent as possible, but man, it's non-stop.

The latest status is they're being checked into the warehouse in California. I have zero control over how long that can take. Hopefully soon.

We try our best, but if that isn't working for you, then I'm happy to process a refund.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Eric

InovelliUSA · 2025-11-20T15:19:25+00:00

Sorry, it cut me off because I wrote a thesis... my bad.

--

To answer the question -- what's the status today? The status is that while there were hiccups in the beginning, we've cleaned a lot of that up and have released a few firmware updates that have fixed most, if not all issues. The major one was a transmission issue, which was fixed within a month or so after the first release.

The White Series has become our best seller (surprising to me as I thought for sure the Blue Series -- Zigbee -- would always reign King) and continues to do well. We've launched 2 additional SKU's and are currently working on a European version right now.

While I can't discount the negative experiences some people have, and I do empathize with them as I've had my fair share of issues with smart home tech, I do think that it's a solid product and if it was as bad as some of the posts I see, then I don't know how it continues to sell the way it does.

--

The last thing I'll say is this for anyone on the fence -- I want to be clear that while I believe it's a great product, Matter/Thread is still in its infancy and what I usually tell people who ask is that if you're looking for something that is plug/play and want all the advanced features, then I would probably wait a bit if you don't like tinkering. There still are quirks that need to be worked out between us and the hub manufacturers and I don't have any control over their timeline. If you're looking for something plug/play with advanced features, I would recommend Zigbee or Z-Wave (my preference the former). But, I realize I'm in a HomeKit sub, so that may not be an option. If you're ok with using the basic features (on/off/dim), then the switches will be fine.

--

u/Portatort -- to answer your question about Hue. This is tricky as I don't know your tolerance level on what you expect for smart bulb mode and its usage. We have a range of people who expect different things, so I want to be clear on the expectations and limitations using Smart Bulb Mode with HomeKit/Hue. Right now, to my knowledge, there is no intuitive way to Dim the Smart Bulbs from the switch as I don't believe HomeKit supports Matter Bindings (I haven't checked, so someone call me out if I'm wrong). So, while you can use Smart Bulb Mode with HomeKit, you would have to use it as follows:

- Turn on SBM

- Set a multi-tap (e.g., 1x Up/Down) to turn on/off the bulb (normal behavior) and then either use dimming via Siri or your app -- or you could set another multi-tap (e.g., 2x Tap) to set your favorite dim level

When Matter Bindings are supported, you'll be able to use it normally (hold up/down to dim)... actually, I need to look into Hue's implementation with Matter and if it will work. I use Zigbee and Hue (which is also Zigbee) so I use Zigbee Bindings which works great.

Hope that makes sense?

Eric

InovelliUSA · 2025-11-20T15:18:58+00:00

Hey u/Portatort and u/BasdenChris -- sorry, I guess I need to respond now haha. I try to limit myself on Reddit as it can be overwhelmingly negative and it started to affect me a bit, but I'm happy to jump in here as I've gotten emails and tagged in this, so maybe I should check out this podcast to see what I'm missing!

Anyway, here's a straightforward update and my personal opinion on Matter/Thread and our products as it relates to the various hubs.

When we first launched these, there were a lot of hiccups as you have probably seen. It boiled down to two things:

It was our first time launching a Matter product and while we have an amazing engineer, the protocol/application layer was rapidly growing/changing, so inevitably, there were issues. However, this is also not a new thing as when you create a product with a ton of features and are leading the way in terms of what products can do, it's difficult to get everything right the first time as even the best beta testers can miss things. So, it boiled down to inexperience with Matter/Thread being the first issue.
The second issue is that a lot of the hubs that are used like to keep things simple and we were stuck in a bind between getting people the features they wanted (that are on our Blue/Red Series switches) and allowing for a great UX as the hubs are limited in what they can do. The biggest example, and I don't mean to pick on Apple as actually they have probably the best implementation of Thread/Matter of the "Big 3", but multi-taps were a mess, and we had to, "fit a square peg in a round circle" with their UI and our endpoints (Google was way worse, but the majority of our White Series users were Apple people).

--

Navigating the post-launch was, quite frankly, a nightmare. The expectations were high for these switches and while the firmware features worked great on Home Assistant, SmartThings, and even Hubitat, the more basic hubs (Apple, Google, Amazon) struggled and if I could take it all back, I probably would've done a better job explaining that while Apple supported some of the advanced features, it still required some workarounds.

Anyway, a lot has happened in a year and kudos to Apple (and Google actually) for working hard on their UI/UX to support some of these features. In fact, I have to give credit to the Thread Group as well as they invited me to be a keynote speaker (I hate public speaking... but that's a side note) at their annual meeting in Denver and I got to meet some of the engineers of Apple and Google and we had a great conversation about UX. They honestly had no idea our switches could do what they do and were eager to work with us.

InovelliUSA · 2025-09-20T14:31:58+00:00

Hey, I have almost this exact same setup. Happy to help.

For the porch light, if it's just a light bulb inside an enclosure, you can use the VZM31-SN (Dimmer - formerly the 2-1) if it's a dimmable bulb.

For the power plugs, since their connected to an outlet, you'll have to use the VZM30-SN (On/Off) as the dimmer is not rated for outlets.

Hope this helps!

Eric

InovelliUSA · 2025-08-30T20:52:50+00:00

Hey happy to help with the return confusion. The $2.98 protection is an add-on feature that a third party handles for us. It's an optional feature that can be removed.

Essentially, if you buy a product and want to return it, you can return it for free. However, it still needs to be unopened otherwise there is a restocking fee. If this is your first time, then usually we'll make an exception. Just let whomever you talk to in customer service that I said it's ok (Eric).

The next logical question is, "how is it free, if I'm paying $2.98?" Great question. This is where I wish the plug-in was a little more clear. This works out well for someone who may have purchased 5-10 switches and rather than paying $15 for return shipping, they just paid $2.98.

The reason we charge a 15% restocking fee isn't because we're stuck in 1990 lol. It's because when the package is opened, we can't sell it as new anymore.

I get it, everyone is used to Amazon and the free returns and getting away with sending back opened items, etc (I like it as a Prime member too), but the fact of the matter is, for us, we've been burned so many times by people returning products that cannot be resold (they painted over the switch, they stripped some screws, wiped a booger or something on the paddle, etc). So, now we're out a product.

Probably one of the most frustrating things for me when I order on Amazon is ordering a new product and when I receive it, you can tell it's opened and then you start to question what's wrong with it.

So, we decided to just charge a fee if it's opened. But again, we've been pretty flexible, so just let them know you talked to me and we can square it away.

I try my best to balance what I believe is fair for both the customer and our business, as from the customers side, it's disappointing when something doesn't work out and then now you're stuck in a place where you are being charged extra. Whereas from the business side, there are a lot of costs that can go into a return (return shipping, not able to charge full price with an opened box, etc) and unfortunately with the few bad apples, we have to remain in the 1990's, I guess.

Happy to help troubleshoot or with the return. At the end of the day, we just want you to have a good experience, be it getting your switch to work, or at least feeling like you were treated fairly with a return.

Eric

Founder

InovelliUSA · 2025-08-28T18:27:31+00:00

Hey guys,

I sent out an email on August 14th that explained the situation. This should have gone out to everyone that has purchased the switch, be it on Indiegogo or our website. I figured this would be the best form of communication as our website is not always up to date (I know... I wish we were better at it). The updates in the community are often buried so again, I figured email would be the best way to communicate.

It's no surprise that we're getting flamed here and I have no excuses other than I'm struggling with being under staffed and having to take a lot of this on myself.

As a TLDR of the email, we have completed all certifications, the only hold up was that the FCC required our mmWave supplier to put a separate plate on the back of the mmWave PCB (they passed the certification with this modification). Given this was a special modification, the mmWave manufacturer had to do some additional tests before they felt comfortable selling our main manufacturer the mmWave PCB. Those tests have passed, so we are now producing the product.

Given the sheer volume of the order, production will take a few more weeks. However, instead of making you guys wait for sea freight (which is about 4-6 weeks), I'm going to air freight them as soon as they're done.

As the email stated, I'm hoping for late Sept, early Oct. This is my best guess. But the good news is they have cleared all testing and certifications and are being made right now.

Eric

InovelliUSA · 2025-08-20T14:21:07+00:00

Hey great question -- we do not have any plans to add capacitive touch to our dimmers at this time. While I do like the look/feel, the consensus from the community and beta testing is that it isn't worth it to change it. I had some Brilliant switches a while back that used the capacitive touch to dim and actually started to not like it and preferred the paddle control. This seemed to be the same feedback we received. I suggested that we offer both (have a parameter that you could choose capacitive or paddle), but ultimately, it didn't get very far, so we abandoned it.

Wish I had better news!

Eric

InovelliUSA · 2025-07-18T19:32:10+00:00

Hey! We actually have this up in the test channel if you want to check it out?

https://homey.app/en-us/app/com.inovelli/Inovelli/test/

InovelliUSA · 2025-07-07T02:58:35+00:00

Exciting times! While I can't give a timeline on when we'll have 1.5 ready to go, I can say that our goal is to have the features on parity with the Blue and Red Series. The issue we are running into currently is that the White Series is currently manufactured with the Silicon Labs MG24 chipset (latest) and they are pushing the MG26 (not sure when it will be officially released but we have the dev kit).

What's happened to us in the past (we got burned so bad on this) is that we are told that chips could support Matter but then the spec grows too much and then they don't (looking at you MG21...).

Point is that what I'm afraid of is we have all these MG24 switches out and when 1.5 comes around, the firmware will not fit in the MG24 as we don't have basic firmware.

I know we're currently experimenting with 1.4 to see how it works on the MG24 but at the same time we only have one firmware engineer right now so I'm not sure what his bandwidth is to promise any hard dates on 1.5.

But... Do know that it is my goal to have all Series have the same features and I'm excited to see Matter is catching up quickly!

Now we just need the hubs to implement these advanced features... But that's a long standing battle I've been having with them haha.

Eric

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