Hulo, first post here, but thought it was worth chiming in…
We’ve just had our whole house completely refurbished and I decided, perhaps foolishly, to go all in on HA without ever having used it. I also very much wanted to do both smart bulbs and smart switches… it’s such an obviously useful combo that I can’t believe it’s not more common. As such I just went straight ahead and had the builder put Aqara H1 switches on prettymuch every switch (except some multi-point ones - I’ll figure them out myself later) and Innr spotlights in every room (and outdoor lights too).
This last week I finally got to getting started with HA and it’s been… challenging… to say the least. At several points I came to the conclusion that the H1/decoupled thing just didn’t work, which was gutting because I had based so much of how I wanted the house to work around it… but… I got there in the end!!! They’re working now - in all their decoupled glory. I still have many hours of setting up automations ahead of me to have them set up as I want, but the bare-bones functionality is there. As such I wanted to share what my set up is and a couple of the key hurdles in case it’s any use to anyone else.
Setup: I’m running HAOS via Proxmox on a Lenovo Thinkcentre Mini. I started off with ZHA but almost immediately realised I needed to pivot to ZigbeeMQTT to have any hope of getting decoupled work. My dongle is a Sonoff Dongle-P. I Initially got a Dongle-E before realising that was a bad move… it might be that decoupled can work with the E, but it didn’t for me. I also had a bear of a time getting ZMQTT set up due to some glitch where it wasn’t saving the config during setup, but that’s a whole different story and I got there in the end.
My Aqaras are a mix of WS-EUK03 and 04.
Right, all that done I got the first of my Aqara switches paired to ZMQTT, working as switches, but… no decoupled. I read many forums, jumped through many hoops, nearly gave up multiple times, but in the end I think the two critical moves I made were as follows:
- Updating the dongle firmware. Again this was a bear of a process because the bootloader button on the dongle refused to work so ended up going the Python route which was a bit outside of my comfort zone, but there was an excellent guide on youtube.
Once I had done the update suddenly my H1s were showing the decoupled option, and could be decoupled, with the switch no longer cutting the power… but still I was seemingly getting no report of switch presses, and no option to use switch presses as a trigger in automations.
- Again I went round in circles for hours and almost gave up. And then I came across a post on reddit (I wish I could credit the user but I’ve lost the post in my sea of tabs and now can’t seem to find it). The gist of it was: The H1s will not initially show their switch responses, you have to ‘train’ ZMQTT on what they are capable of. You literally single click on the switch a half dozen or so times in succession, then do the same with double clicks, and only then will single and double click (and supposedly long click but we’ll get to that) will show up in HA.
I thought “surely it cannot be that simple?!!”… but I went to my nearest switch and single clicked it a bunch of times (a couple of seconds between each), then the same with double click… I went back to HA and there they were ![:crazy_face: :crazy_face:](https://community.home-assistant.io/images/emoji/twitter/crazy_face.png?v=12)
According to the same user, the one caveat is that they will be forgotten after a reboot, so if you reboot you have to go round and do the same little training procedure for all your switches. A bit of a ball ache but a small price to pay to have them working. Also the reddit poster reported having single, double, and long press working - I have single and double working on all mine without issue, but can’t seem to get long press trained in. Still, it’s a niggle and far from the end of the world - the core function is there and that’s all I care about.
So there you go… maybe useful to someone. It’s such an amazing setup if you can get it working - you can be so creative with how the switches work, all while not having to worry about ever changing their batteries, and not having your smart bulbs ever power down & drop off the network. Perfection.