Home Assistant and IHC Dimmers

The older wired dimmer 350LR and unidimmer 350/400/1000, are causing problems for a lot of people, so this post will be about what you can do, and cannot do. The new 2 channel LED dimmer RS485 and the wireless dimmers, all work fine with Home Assistant so this is not about them.

What you cannot do: The problem with the older dimmers are that there is no “feekback” from the dimmer to the controller, so the IHC does not know the on/off state or lightlevel of the dimmer. The lightlevel is set by holding down a button and the light will go up or down while you hold the button – and since the IHC controller does not know the level or can set it directly, there is no way to make Home Assistant control the light level. What you can do: You can have Home Assistant control the light with only on/off.  You will have to let the controller manage an assume on/off starte. The premade function block 1.2.02.c in IHC visual already have this functionallity. This is how it looks in IHC visual:

The on/off state is the bottom output marked with a red dot. The 2 inputs marked with red dots are the turn on and turn off inpouts. With these 3 you can setup a light i Home Assistant:

ihc:
  - url: 'http://192.168.1.3'
    username: YOUR_USERNAME
    password: YOUR_PASSWORD
    light:
      - id: 123
        on_id: 456
        off_of: 789
        name: mylight

About manual setup look at the Home assistant dokumentation: Home Assistant IHC Integration

The “id” is the IHC resource id of the “Lysdæmper tændt” output. The “on_id” and “off_id” are the IHC resource ids of the 2 inputs “Tænd/reguler op” and “sluk/reguler ned”. The limitations of doing it this way is that the internal state out in the IHC controller can get out of sync. That is why I call it an assumed state. The IHC controller assumes that when it send an on pulse the light will turn on. P.S. I am not the (un)happi owner of any of these dimmers, so the above is not something I use myself, and because of this I have no idea about how often this out of sync problem occurs. But the above should explain why it is not something that can be fixed in the Integration to Home Assistant.

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