Hey everyone
I’m looking for a physical button that is battery powered that creates an entity in home assistant that I can use to turn on and off another entity in home assistant, in this case either a smart bulb/smart plug
The guy in this video has achieved what I want but I’m looking for a button that I don’t need another hub to connect it to like the Xiaomi aqara stuff. I don’t want to buy into another ecosystem for one light bulb.
Anyone know of anything that can do this?
What ‘ecosystems’ do you have now ?
Good luck with that. I’ll follow that post.
That’s what I wanted but couldn’t find any. I went with Aqara hub and Aqara Wireless switch
Well my led strips are limitless led and my light bulbs are mi-light. I know mi-light have a wall control but it’s a bit too complicated for what I’m looking for.
I’ve been looking for something similar. So far I’ve been using cheap rf switches or Amazon Dash buttons I had laying around. The RF switches use a Sonoff rf bridge flashed with Tasmota to receive the presses and the dash buttons which are slower but fine for turning on lamps or sockets are using dasshio to intercept. Neither are a perfect solution but cheap and generally work ok.
Rf switch:
Sonoff RF Bridge:
https://a.aliexpress.com/ZsDTjl9F5
Dasshio: https://github.com/danimtb/dasshio/
It doesn’t seem to be very likely to get a button with no hub, because this would mean wifi (which of course has a hub, but never mind), and wifi is fairly power hungry. Battery wifi devices like cameras have pretty bulky batteries, which doesn’t work for the form factor of a switch.
You could look at flic switches which can use your phone as the hub (using bluetooth). However, it’s probably only a matter of time before you want another battery operated device (eg. motion sensor), so maybe now is the time to bite the bullet with Zigbee/ZWave. In this case a Conbee II might be a better choice than a brand-specific hub (like Aqara/Ikea/Hue).
Yeah just bite the bullet and get a zigbee /zwave hub. Get the smart things buttons. They are cheap and work well. I have one mounted to my living room switch to do the lights.
So can I use any ZigBee usb stick to communicate with the aqara switches? Or is it only the conbee one that can do it?
Look into Zigbee2MQTT, it support cheap USB hardware that can control a lot of Zigbee devices.
Yes, I use zigbee2mqtt with both ikea and xiaomi devices.
That’s exactly what I was just doing.
This for example
This should work right?
Haven’t got a huge understanding of mqtt but I’m sure I can learn.
This would be a good place to start:
Btw Ikea has just announced they are going to start selling zigbee buttons for $7.
Yeah, quite nice:
Thanks for the link freakshock
The IKEA buttons look nice, hopefully they will become a part of the tradfri line or whatever they decide to rename it to.
I wonder if they will release them in the UK at the same time as the US?
You can also consider using Deconz, which is built into Home Assistant, instead of Zigbee2Mqtt. I started with Zigbee2Mqtt, but I wasn’t satisfied with the results. Deconz has several advantages:
I have tried them both. Both solutions will work. I am just a lot happier with the built-in Zigbee solution than I was with the MQTT option.
I’ve heard of deconz but never known what it is.
What advantages/disadvantages did you find?
Can you use the zigbee2mqtt usb board with deconz then?
I’ve bought the one on eBay I posted earlier so I will give it a try and see what it does and doesn’t do
Deconz isn’t built in to Home Assistant, ZHA is. However, both are viable options.
@Sam1501 as you might have gathered, there are three Zigbee integrations you can use on Home Assistant. The docs for each explain which sticks are compatible:
ZHA
deCONZ
zigbee2mqtt (as also linked in a previous post)
Thanks for the links, I will see what I can do with stick I’ve bought and go from there
I use HUSBZB with pretty good success. It’s nice because it’s both zwave and zigbee.
