PDL/Clipsal Wiser Dimmers in zigbee2mqtt

wiser.md

After a bunch of back and forth and many hours of trial and error, I've finally got a robust way to integrate the Clipsal/PDL Iconic dimmers integrated into Home Assistant via zigbee2mqtt.

I have submitted a PR that adds a zigbee-herdsman-converter that means the dimmers should be recognised automatically by zigbee2mqtt, allowing them to be controlled by Home Assistant like any other compatible device.

As it transpires, this was actually really easy once I worked out what to do, so this isn't even a hack.

Switching to zigbee mode

If you have the PDL354PBDMBTW or 41EPBDWCLM devices you can switch these over to zigbee mode by pressing the button 12 times (thanks to @ell249 for the tip).

After you press it 12 times it will take a few seconds then start flashing red. Then it takes another half minute or so to settle in and as long as your network permits joining it should show up as a device and join the network.

If you have problems, or you want to revert to BLE mode just do the standard factory reset by pressing the button 3 times quickly, then holding until the light flashes red slowly, then flashes red quickly. Make sure you hold on until it flashes quickly, otherwise it doesn't reset. This was the mistake I made and left me thinking I had bricked it.

Limitations

Once you switch to zigbee mode, you can't connect to it via the Wiser Room app to do firmware upgrades and such. It appears that the zigbee mode is supported by the Wiser by SE app, but it seems like you need a Wiser Hub to do this. So far, I haven't tried to make support for OTA via zigbee2mqtt.

There are some other settings that the zigbee certification document say are supported that I haven't gone through and made show up in zigbee2mqtt. I think it supports LevelCtrl and other things, but I couldn't get them to work easily and frankly I was more interested in the on/off and brightness control than anything else.

is there any way to configure the dimmer behaviour with these when they turn on/off?

• it likes to return to the previous brightness state but with a slow transition
• on/off actions have a fade in/out where obviously the swithces do not

I'd like to be able set the on behaviour and also that transition time to be actually zero.

The transitions mess with automations that I use to control the brightness in home assistant

@alexeiw123 did you get anywhere with this?

I’ve got the same issue - figured I can delay the trigger from HA by a few seconds and it usually works ok, but it feels terrible.

is there any way to configure the dimmer behaviour with these when they turn on/off?

• it likes to return to the previous brightness state but with a slow transition
• on/off actions have a fade in/out where obviously the swithces do not

I'd like to be able set the on behaviour and also that transition time to be actually zero.
The transitions mess with automations that I use to control the brightness in home assistant

@alexeiw123 did you get anywhere with this?

I’ve got the same issue - figured I can delay the trigger from HA by a few seconds and it usually works ok, but it feels terrible.

No change to the transition behaviour but I managed to find a different approach than using automations for linking brightness between lights. That is to use binds in ZigBee. That minimum transition time seems to be fixed though, haven't found a workaround.