Leviton Scene Controller RZCZ4 help

Community Playground General Discussions
1

Hi All, I have put these in and they work “sort of.” When I press the button they activate the scene, but the LED’s do not light up on the Controller and the off function is somewhat flaky (I can assign an alternate scene to the off function but it does not seem to activate reliably). Any ideas or is this just a limitation of the Vera-Leviton interface?

Thanks!

2

I posted numerous blogs about the Leviton Scene and Zone controllers. Take a peek at past discussions…bottom line for me is to use the Leviton Handheld programmer as a primary and Vera as a secondary. That was the only way to make the controllers work for me!
Regards
Tim Alls
AllSeas yachts

3

I’ve struggled with getting particular Leviton in-wall scene controllers to work for months myself. In particular, a VRCS4-1LZ which:

  1. Initially had all the buttons offset by 1 (i.e. button 1 triggered scenes assigned to button 2 etc)
  2. Cannot detect a scene’s “on” state, so never executes the scenes assigned to the “off” event
  3. Does not turn on the button LEDs when scenes are turned on.

The short story appears to be that this all seems to come down to this device (and others of its generation) using a (relatively) old version of Leviton firmware. Older versions of Levitons scene controller firmware (such as is in the VRCS4-1LZ) indexed the buttons from 0 to 3, now it’s 1 to 4. Also, older versions simply executed scenes, having no concept of a scene’s “on” or “off” state, which is why the off events never get executed. Finally, the scene controller doesn’t support the “SceneControllerLED1” action, meaning external (non-Leviton?) devices can’t control the LEDs. I’d suggest checking this page to test if your device supports that action:

[url=http://wiki.micasaverde.com/index.php/Leviton_LED_Debugging]http://wiki.micasaverde.com/index.php/Leviton_LED_Debugging[/url]

In the end, I’ve addressed the problems as follows:

  1. Micasaverde released an update for me a while ago that resolves the button addressing incompatibility
  2. Rather than define an “on” and an “off” scene, I’ve created one trigger scene that I’ve associated with the “on” event on button 1. I added an extremely simple Lua script to the scene’s Luup tab that turns the device on if it’s off, and off if it’s on. Functionally, it works just fine.
  3. I’ve learned to live with it. Evidently, there’s nothing I can do within Vera if the device doesn’t support the command. I’ve read that the only potential solution would be to use a Leviton device as the primary controller, and set Vera up as a secondary. I haven’t tested this though, and it’s not worth the expense just to get the button LEDs to work, for me at least.

Also, as a closing comment, I should mention that I recently purchased a VRCS4-MRX and it has none of these problems. Evidently, it uses a newer version of Leviton firmware.

Hope this was helpful,

-A

4

Thanks. This is super helpful. I agree that it is not worth it to me to buy a leviton controller just to get the leds to work. I will probably just assign this so that each button only activates one scene each time you press it (on or off). But will also try to the LED debugging here.

Thanks again!

5

Heavy Sigh. Well now it is working fine. I just had not selected “Automatically turn on/off the scene indicator lights” from the scene tab.

Thanks again for the help.