I’m sorry you have to endure this. I know that my frustrations were hard to contain when the forces prevented us from shipping CORE. I can imagine how you feel. You should reach out to Eric and just talk to him about it. See what his plans are for this. Then you’ll be able to decide your position. I know him personally. I know he’s approachable.
He’s very personable, I agree. Unfortunately he’s had ample opportunity to figure this out, and has only succeeded at muddying the waters. Promises of FIFO fulfillmet with express shipping morphed into batch shipping accomplished in a 2-day span, which then changed to shipment priorities based on order complexity. Based on reports in the Inovelli forums, it seems that none of this is true and it’s truly random, all at the whim of their fulfillment vendor. Promises of personalized order status PMs were not honored. Honestly I think he’s gotten in over his head, and if it’s too much for him at this scale I’m not confident about the future at Inovelli. The product looks like it might be a winner… still too soon to tell. What I can tell is that on the business side there is a huge gap that needs to be bridged before I feel comfotable investing many hundreds of $… what if I need support in a year and they’ve sunk their ship?
Fair enough.
Got a tracking # this evening… fingers crossed! 
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Just got my Blues today. Looks like HA is having issues with signal on the Blues.
Certain the “Erics” will figure it out.
Ugly start for the product line… 20/20 switches that shipped to me are impacted by the manufacturing defect. Fingers crossed it gets sorted out with the next batch and the product succeeds! It promises to fill a huge void in the marketplace, assuming they get all these early mistakes corrected…
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Yeah that is not good, if you have switches starting with those addresses are they completely unusable or what is the current situation? I have not had a chance to even open my pack of 10 yet, but I was early like you, so I assume all of my are bad.
Even more annoying for me though since these blues are what I was waiting for to convert completely over to CORE. I currently have Kasa’s and I could technically just leave those on Hubitat, but I wanted a clean break.
I guess I can wait a few more months, hopefully the core firmware updater will be out by then.
Some are usable, sort of, and some are completely uncommunicative. Not sure how you can tell the difference without trying. I only installed one, and it constantly has lqi between 20 and 30, but seems to work just fine (automations, reporting, etc). It doesn’t route for anything, though, because the rest of my mesh recognizes it as a poor performer and avoids it. I’m holding off on the other 19, and will start my journey with the Blues once the replacements come.
Apparently, the key differentiator is the IEEE address for the switch, if it starts with 94 or 38, it is bad, and I assume others are okay. Or is it not that cut and dry? Do some switches with 94 or 38 still work and some that do not have that like those that have a 04 address not work?
There are a couple flavors of 94:xx:xx out there, but to my understanding only one is impacted. If you have 94:34:69 or 38:5b:44 at the start of the address, it needs to be replaced. Otherwise, I think you’re good to install.
Edit: I installed one of the impacted 94:34:69 switches before it was established that there was a manufacturing defect. Very low lqi, but it works reliably (no devices are choosing to route through it, tho). YMMV with these. Going to wait until the replacement plan is in place - i don’t see any point in installing known-bad hardware
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I’ve been seeing better LQI’s since the last firmware update.
Which addresses are your switches?
Getting ready to request a refund for my Blue 2-1 order in its entirety. Inovelli made (imo) a bad choice to try and cram as much non-neutral compatibility as they could into the switch, with the side-effect of forcing them to use leading-edge dimming. Leading-edge is garbage, and I don’t want it. At the end of the day, the dimmers need to dim some bulbs - fancy notification bars don’t make up for the fact that in the current dimming implementation these 2-1 switches uses an inferior (and for me, incompatible) dimming technique. Maybe they can solve the issue with a firmware change to alter the timing of the gate signal to the FET, but I’m not holding my breath. 20/20 bad switches means my install footprint is minimal, so it won’t be difficult to revert to my Zooz dimmers (I only have 1 Blue installed, very close to my Sonoff coordinator).
I’m sorry to hear that you’re having such struggles. In fairness has there been other chatter on this topic elsewhere? You have me curious and I’d like to read up on it.
The link in my previous post contains most of it - the most relevant is this one, where someone with more gear at home than me went and measured the Blue switch output and proved it was forward-phase. Also proved that the relay doesn’t bypass the dimming circuit when it’s configured as an on/off device (another black mark). Eric provided some of the rationale for their design choices in this post… all of it makes sense from a product marketing point of view. From what I’ve gleaned poking around the web, most LED bulb manufacturers don’t include the power conditioning needed to deal with forward-phase dimming. It’s more expensive and complex, and therefore isn’t done as often. Dimmable LEDs are mostly specified to work with trailing-edge (reverse-phase) dimmers.
Unfortunately for Inovelli, I think this is a bigger deal than they realize. Many people won’t read before posting, and they’ll be flooded with complaints about buzzing, flickering, and otherwise poor dimming performance. Some will choose to do the legwork and find replacement bulbs that work with the dimmer. I won’t be among them - I have many fixtures that use less-common bulb sizes that are hard to find in LED versions. The versions I can find are made by Feit, and are most assuredly on the cheap end of the spectrum and (I can confirm) only work with reverse-phase dimmers. My better half likes the fixtures, so my bulb/dimmer combo needs to work with them. Inovelli has a great-looking feature set as far as smart switch capabilities go, but it’s wasted if they can’t give me a dimmer designed to handle the majority of LED bulb designs. I really want to like this product, and in many respects I do, but if it fails at its core mission I can’t use it or recommend it.
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