I have 240 LED downlights that I want to control with Homey. These LED downlights are powered by 30 LED drivers of type Mean Well LCM-60 DA. It’s a 60W DALI enabled driver.
From what I understand it’s not a problem to interact with DALI from a KNX system!?
And it seems that Homey can only talk to KNX and not DALI directly - is this correct!?
I have no DALI master or KNX bus in my system today. The drivers are all separate.
Soooo…what do I need to get things going so that I can control & dim my lights from Homey?
I’ve seen the KNX starter kit but that is only good if you have a KNX system already. But what to do if you start from scratch like me?
from the manual : Built-in 2 in 1 dimming function, output constant current level can be adjusted through output terminal by 0 ~ 10Vdc or 10V PWM signalbetween DIM+ and DIM-.
I tried that in my first attempt with the LCM-60 (the driver version that supports 0-10V dimming input) together with Qubino Flush Dimmer 0-10.
At first glance it should work…but it doesn’t…
Reason is that the driver can only dim down to 6%.
So when the Qubino sends out 0V it thinks that it tells the driver to shut down but in fact, it will dim to 6% resulting in the inability to shut down the lights totally.
My first thought was to introduce another secondary mains-switch to the driver but that would mean that I need two buttons to each driver, one for dimming and one for turning on/off.
But the problems doesn’t end there…
Since the driver powers the qubino it would effectively kill the Qubino when turning off the driver.
So the next time the driver would turn on, it would restart the Qubino which would then first dim the lights up and then down to it’s previous state.
Also, sending a command to the Qubino to dim up before turning on the driver would be meaningless…
Very inconvenient but also very expensive and last but not least…0-10V is a deprecated way of dimming leds…
So I went for the LCM-60DA drivers instead which support DALI…
And so, here I am with a DALI system that I want to connect to a KNX system so that it can talk to Homey.
Any thoughts on that?
Hi Richard
I also have an installation with LCM25DA drivers and a homey box
Did you find a solution for piloting drivers in Dali? Obliged to go through knx?
Thank you
I ended up with a KNX + Dali module as well.
The KNX is only there for Homey-KNX communication basically.
Although I found that buying a super-simple KNX solution wasn’t that expensive (in the range of 300-400 USD) and the programming was done by myself without any licensing costs due to the fact that my KNX solution is so small. Scenes are defined in Homey.
Yes, I did have to buy a KNX IP Gateway (I actually bought the one that Homey’s team suggested here https://homey.app/en-us/store/product/knx-kit-for-homey-731/).
Additionally I bought a KNX-Dali gateway from Hager (TYA670W) and a power supply.
Add some short KNX cables to that and you are done.
I used the free version of ETS5 to setup the KNX dali gateway to my dali drivers (MeanWell LCM60-DA).
I you want to get fancy you can add a binary input (i.e. BE-16230.01) so that you can setup ordinary push-dim buttons (wired) around the house. It’s cheaper per button than going for i.e. z-wave buttons.
