Best lag-free, non-cloud switch for lifx lights?

Hardware
1

I tried out philips hue for my first smart bulb purchase and was not impressed, I now have 12 lifx br30s in can lighting all hooked up and loving them. I am now ready to hardwire the lifx bulbs to be always on and control them via automation alone. I need physical switches that can do this and the homekit leviton decoras have a 1 second delay when using the apple TV for automation.

I just loaded hassio and have my lifx bulbs added. I now need to find a switch that hassio supports that does not require internet. Is zwave the way to go here? Or are any protocols inherently less laggy? Somebody had mentioned keeping your old switches and using a shelly2 device. I wasn’t sure if these would allow for 3 and 4-way switches or for the ability to turn the lights on via hassio even if somebody has flipped the physical switch off. Sorry for the long winded post, let me know your recommendations! Thanks

2

If you can avoid it, I would recommend against Z-Wave. It is expensive and Home Assistant support is not great.

Do you need the switches to fit in place of the old ones?

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3

“+1” on this. Some people swear by it but dispite having a well meshed network (as evidenced by the mapping utilities posed in this forum) I found zWave to be incredibly laggy (+3 sec) and downright unreliable. I was using Aeotec branded devices.

Wifi switches like Sonoff (personal experience) or Shelly (no personal experience) are fast and reliable. You would be using them to only detect switch presses not to physically remove power to the bulbs (or HA loses contact with the lights). Just use HA automations to detect the switch condition and control the lights.

You can use your existing wall plates and switches.

Neutral wires are required fore these. They are required for most zwave switches too btw.

Most of the lights in my house are now Lifx. Love them.

I don’t bother with switches though. Mine are automated using presence (basically if the alarm is armed or not), outside light level, and motion (wired PIRs).

The lounge room lights (where I can sit still for longer than the PIR timeout) do not turn off with lack of motion but with an ‘in bed’ sensor (or outside light level).

Watching movies changes the light scene in the lounge or cinema.

They dim between 10pm and midnight.

The doorbell pulses some lights purple.

I have a lamp that shows me my room temperature with colour (red through to blue) or if HA has an issue (fuchsia).

Sunset flashes one light green.

After a user set time (input date time) if the lights are off they come on a dim red to preserve night vision and allow me to get back to sleep easily (if I had to get up for something).

Bedside lamp is controlled with Siri or my iPad.

Basically I haven’t touched a light switch for a month. And the only reason for that was when I was moving HA from a Pi to a mini PC and all automations were unavailable. Fortunately, as you know, Lifx can still be activated with the normal light switch.

I also have a relay to detect resumption of power after an outage (HA is on a UPS that runs for +60min) and if it is daytime turn all the lights off (they come on after power loss).

Wow. Sorry. Got a bit carried away there. Main point: do you really need switches or can you (with a few extra sensors) automate light switches out of your life?

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4

Thanks for the replies, I actually couldn’t even get my test zwave switch paired to the aotec stick so that’s out. I have some Shellys on the way so hopefully these work out.

I think I’ll stick with switches for my first setup, I’m sure as I add more devices I may be able to get all lights automated.

Here is the million dollar question: is there any way to get a decora style dimmer switch to control lifx brightness? I wasn’t big on the philiphs hue dimmer and was hoping to use something more traditional looking.

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You could adapt this:

Again, you dont actually want to reduce power to your lights, just send the commands to HA (via mqtt) and have it dim the Lifx bulbs.

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This is what I do to have the best of both worlds. You could use this same idea but pass the commands to home assistant to change the lights.

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7

Has anybody retrofitted an incandescent dimmer with some sort of tasmota device? Like similar to what the shelly1/2 does for retrofitting existing switches but with a dimmer? Can you use gpio pins to measure resistance/voltage from the incandescent dimmer and send those values as mqtt packets to HA?

8

I finally got my shellys installed on the 3-way switch and they are AWESOME!
Zero lag whatsoever, stock firmware supports mqtt right out of the box, no need to flash tasmota and I get to keep my existing switches. Unfortunately I couldn’t use the traditional 3-way switch wiring in conjunction with a single shelly (as outlined by thehookup) due to my line and load being in different boxes. You can still hear the relay clicking behind the plate even though it isn’t hooked up to anything. I haven’t found a way to disable the relay in edge switch mode yet. My setup is as follows:

Lifx bulbs and shellys wired to constant power, existing 3-way switches provide a switched 110v input to the shellys for switch sense but the shellys output relay is not hooked up to anything. Shellys are configured in edge switch mode. Here is the code i came up with to emulate 3-way switch behavior, It’s my first attempt at an automation but it has been working great so far:

config.yaml:
    
    #Switches
    switch:
      - platform: mqtt
        name: "TV LightsA"
        state_topic: "shellies/shelly1-XXXXXX/input/0"
        command_topic: "shellies/shelly1-XXXXXX/relay/1/command"
        payload_on: "1"
        payload_off: "0"
        retain: false

      - platform: mqtt
        name: "TV LightsB"
        state_topic: "shellies/shelly1-ZZZZZZ/input/0"
        command_topic: "shellies/shelly1-ZZZZZZ/relay/1/command"
        payload_on: "1"
        payload_off: "0"
        retain: false

automation.yaml:

  alias: TV lights A statechange
  trigger:
  - entity_id: switch.tv_lightsa
    platform: state
    to: 'on'
  - entity_id: switch.tv_lightsa
    platform: state
    to: 'off'
  condition: []
  action:
  - data:
      entity_id: group.tvlights
    service: light.toggle
  initial_state: 'on'

  alias: TV lights B statechange
  trigger:
  - entity_id: switch.tv_lightsb
    platform: state
    to: 'on'
  - entity_id: switch.tv_lightsb
    platform: state
    to: 'off'
  condition: []
  action:
  - data:
      entity_id: group.tvlights
    service: light.toggle
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9

I guess I’m lucky? My Zwave network is stellar. I can walk into a room and the minute the motion detector blinks my lights flash on. No delays and my zwave network has never crashed. i use the Husbzb-1. Recently got the zigbee working on it well too by removing a sensor that was causing havoc on my system!

The other user however is 100% true about it being expensive. I do like that it doesn’t run on the 2.4 network but compared to zigbee or Sonoff you can’t really justify the price.

10

That is not really lag-free :joy:

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12

Well i cant make the motion detector detect me before i make motion so unless it can become psychic ill just have to deal with the milliseconds it takes to see me.

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That was a joke, “the minute” and “the milliseconds” are not the same thing …

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