How does the system work?

[Falconbal]

Does the bridge always broadcast a signal? Or does it ONLY broadcast out to the switches when it’s called upon by the app? Where can I find in depth technical information on that?

if the bridge is not installed, does the pico remotes still work?

[Shawn Parr]

When you setup a Pico to control a dimmer in the app, it actually pairs them in a similar fashion to how you can pair them if you have no Smart Bridge. So when you use the Pico the signal it sends can be directly received by a dimmer, which then reacts. The hub also rebroadcasts this if it “hears” a Pico being used, so that dimmers that are too far from the Pico, but near enough to the Smart Bridge, still work while the Pico is being used.

This works very well. I have some plug in dimmer that are just far enough away from the bridge that the signal can sometimes be intermittent, i.e. when controlling from the app sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. The Picos in the room with the dimmers that are assigned to them always work 100%. Another Pico I have that triggers things on a 3rd party system is also hit or miss, as the hub doesn’t always “hear” it and send the info on the telnet interface. I’m currently renovating and plan on setting up another plug in dimmer as a repeater to make this more reliable when the other work is done.