Mains Dimmers

[SteveJ]

I know this has been discussed on here before, but I wonder if anyone has any more advice on Mains dimming ?

With the price of Loxone Dimmers now well over £100/Channel, and the whitewing units being not currently available, I'm wondering what the best option is for dimming mains circuits (my initial design needs 20 channels - all of which are LEDs lamps - mostly in table/floor lamps and wall fittings, although lack of suitable dimmers may mean I need to re-think and move to on/off switching for some of these channels)

I've spent ages looking around for 0-10v or DMX multichannel 230v dimmers, but not really found anything other than cheap Chinese units (which as per previous threads are probably not going to last too long)

Anyone got any tips ?

Cheers

Steve

[Duncan]

knx - theben dm 8-2 T, 8 channels, x 200w, around £45-50 per channel from europe

shelly dimmers (can get din rail mounts) - not ideal cos use wifi, but reliable, effective trailing edge dimming, around £20 per channel

you could use a 24v dmx decoder to drive SSRs (din mount, 5 channel x 2A, PN5-10DA, zero switching) as temporary on/off solution then swap to Whitewing dmx when they become available

[Jonathan Dixon]

Putting in a left-field option: use smart bulbs of some sort (zigbee/zwave/wifi) in movable fixtures like table & floor lamps.

My assumption is you have another solution in place for the primary lighting in the room, such as constant current or DALI drivers. So the goal of the mains dimming is just for accent/feature or task lighting, where the light fitting limits you to conventional bulb types.

Mains dimming has some inherent drawbacks - it's inefficient and lower performing (flicker or lack of control at low light levels). Using smart bulbs can address both those issues, and also avoids the need for any dedicated wiring so gives total flexibility in moving lights around if needs change. (Just install an extra 13A mains socket anywhere you thought you might have wanted a 5A table light socket). (They also have RGB colour and white temperature control too, if that's your thing.)

I would never consider using wireless bulbs for the primary lighting in a room, but for secondary lighting I think it can be a reasonable tradeoff. But be sure to spend some time with your chosen technology before committing to it in a large way

Personally I'm using Tuya Wifi smart bulbs for some secondary lighting, with customer ESPHome firmware that allows me to control them directly over UDP from the miniserver. So it's dependent on my IP router and wifi access points staying up, but no other server/bridge device and certainly no internet/cloud dependency.

Certainly wouldn't be a preference for everyone, but I'm pretty happy with it.

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[Rydens]

The Shelly din mounted pro range have ethernet connectivity option so fully wired. Great value, and excellent software. 

Cheers Daivd

[Steve Joyner]

Thanks all for the tips

KNX looks to be the best wired option, although I’ve yet to use any KNX in the house, so I expect there would be something of a learning curve there….

The Shelly Dimmer 2 looks good in most respects apart from the reliance on WiFi. [ David - is there a dimmer in the ShelleyPro range ? - I can only find relays? ]. 

I notice that the Tasmota (open-source firmware for ESP devices) project now supports Shelley Dimmer2, and Tasmota in general does offer some KNX support - this doesn't seem to extend to dimming as yet but there could be an avenue there to get road the WiFi communication limitation in the future [ I use Tasmota firmware on cheapo 13A smart plugs and its been great at both control and power monitoring - who would have thought we use so much energy just boiling the Kettle even day!]

Steve

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[Jonathan Dixon]

The Shelly Wifi limitation is not a software issue that would be fixable via different firmware like Tasmota or ESPHome, it's a hardware limitation: it does not have the physical line drivers needed to connect to KNX or ethernet buses.

HOWEVER it does have a UART and a couple GPIO pins, you could conceivably put a custom FW on it that talks modbus over the UART and chain a load of Shelly's off the Loxone Modbus extension 

This would nicely decouple the dimming protocol from IP and wireless, but creates several new problems:

i. you need to write a bunch of custom FW, and 

iii. modbus is not the most robust protocol in my (very limited) experience. If the dimmers are all in one cabinet and you keep the modbus cabling short it should be okay.

iii. it's a very non-standard architecture that will be next to impossible for anyone else to maintain.

It's a kindof intriguing idea though!

(I only think of it because I have emonpi / emonTx  which are supposed to connect over 433 MHz radio but in practice a lot of owners find it more reliable to galvanically connect them up via the uarts - again the uarts were originally only intended for flashing/debugging)

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[Duncan]

i dont think there is much additional value flashing Shelly with tasmota - the shelly firmware already provides support for direct control from loxone and/or mqtt

[Steve Joyner]

Thats kind of what I had in mind when I was reading about KNX support in Tasmota, I’d assumed that as Tasmota supports serial commands sent via the UART pins from a terminal emulator, that they had implemented a way to read KNX protocol over the UART - thereby avoiding having to use MQTT/HTTP etc over the WiFi connection - typically I didn’t really read it in enough detail though, what is described actually seems to be a way to send KNX commands over HTTP - via Wifi.  Doh.

Agree with Duncan in general - Tasmota doesn’t give anything above the Shelley FW in terms of control by protocols running over WiFi - and reading the chat describing the reverse engineering of the FW by Tasmota devs, it sounds like there could well be things in the Shelley FW that work a lot better than the Tasmota implementation - like auto shutdown under excessive temperatures.  However if I had the skills and time to start with custom FW development, I think its at least theoretically possible to build a FW that would allow communication with the device over  the UART via some kind of RS485 based protocol (Modbus/DMX etc) or even via KNX 

Meanwhile, I’m currently thinking that a bunch of Shelleys connected via WiFi might do the trick until the whitewing units become available again, or I take the plunge and implement some KNX dimmers.

Steve

On 26 May 2022, at 10:21, Jonathan Dixon <jo...@splinge.me.uk> wrote:

The Shelly Wifi limitation is not a software issue that would be fixable via different firmware like Tasmota or ESPHome, it's a hardware limitation: it does not have the physical line drivers needed to connect to KNX or ethernet buses.

HOWEVER it does have a UART and a couple GPIO pins, you could conceivably put a custom FW on it that talks modbus over the UART and chain a load of Shelly's off the Loxone Modbus extension 

[David Wallis]

I’ve tested tasmota with knx however gen1 mini server can’t send  knx over Ethernet. So need a bridge from knx to Ethernet

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[Stefan Latt]

Dear All,

Tried to share this in the group but messages was deleted twice, what is going on?

Anyway 

Depending on application you  may be okay to live with the Chinese DMX302s at $12 channel. Had 2 or 3 out of 10 fail but the rest is 3 years now. Key is cooling and airflow in cabinet. They all failed on the hottest summer days.

I  have a 16ch whiteving waiting but have not yet replaced the 302s.

In my new project I do all lights 24v directly from the D4 24v dimmers 

Thx 

Stefan 

Sent on the go!

On May 26, 2022, at 19:29, David Wallis <da...@wallis2000.co.uk> wrote:



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[Steve Joyner]

Thanks for your insight Stefan,  can I ask if you are suing 24V downlights ? If so which ones ?

Steve

[Duncan]

the reason the dmx302s fail is their internal 12v psu overheats - the ones in my garage lasted around 5 years but still failed in the end

if you were to bring the internal 12v connection to the outside and use an external good quality 12v psu they would probably work forever - ok for home brew but no good for a professional install unless you can make it look good with suitable connectors

[Stefan Latt]

See this previous post about the 24v 

Downlight. 

I will install them within four weeks so I can report later.

All this goes into our own buildings

I order from this guy that acts like some kind of trader. Seems he gets what you need. 

steph...@toprgblight.com

https://groups.google.com/g/loxone-english/c/934PFoLwvf4/m/MIgl7CDwAQAJ

Stefan 

Sent on the go!

On May 27, 2022, at 12:23, Steve Joyner <steve....@gmail.com> wrote:



[Simon Still]

As posted on another thread - 

I'd really try to fit LED lights with separate replaceable drivers.  Either constant current or 24v and dim with Dali/DMX/1-10v   240v LED bulbs don't in my experience dim well,  even the expensive GU10 bulbs are prone to fail way before their supposed life and 240v dimmers for Loxone are expensive or unreliable. 

Think about which circuits you really need to dim.  You can create mood in a room by having some fittings lit and not others as well as dimming everything (and it can also be more interesting).  If they are 240v bulbs you can get gu10's from 2w (equivalent of a 15W 150lm halogen) up to 10W (equivalent of a 70W 1000lm halogen) so you can tune the light output of non-dimming lights (or you can just stick a shade on them...) 

On Wednesday, 25 May 2022 at 09:38:05 UTC+1 SteveJ wrote:

[Stefan L]

Hello,

So far the 24V downlights seems to work just fine. Can not beat it at the price and in some cases it may be more economical to replace lights and dimmers then to keep 240V lights and replace the dimmer only with KNX or Whitewing... 

Thank you Stefan 

[Stefan L]

Hello,

What is the best way to add the White Wing dimmer? Add DMW actuator 16 times or 4 x DMX 4 Actuator? Or is there a way to add the 16 channel device? 

Thank you Stefan

[Jonathan Dixon]

You can do either, I suggest doing whichever seems to feel right for the way the outputs are grouped up physically.

See  this thread:  https://groups.google.com/g/loxone-english/c/G1kb5HCZWSg/m/nhhtV1cdFgAJ?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer

Note that you need to figure out if you are using Smart Actuator mode or not, and slightly annoyingly if you decide to change this at a later date for a given actuator it disassociates the output reference and you have recreate the whole thing.

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[Stefan L]

Thank you Joth! 

I use the lighting controller in one building and the std Dimmer controller in the other. I prefer the App view with the toggle switches and I assume that is related to the  lighting controller vs std Dimmer controller? 

[Jonathan Dixon]

Yes the app UI is set by lighting controller v2 Vs dimmer controller. I just use LCv2 myself. If you use Smart Actuator mode I think you have to use LCv2 as that's the only one compatible with it

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