I’m interested in using a device to control my lights in my guest bedrooms, which would be intuitive to the person staying in there. I’m using ZHA in HA for the zigbee integration.
The options I seem to have are:
Buttons (wired/wireless)
IR remote
Wall mounted displays
Tablets running a dashboard
The buttons are fine, and if you are just using them to turn the lights on or off, its ok, but I’d like to be able to give the guest the option to do more, like dimming and colour wheel control.
The IR remote might be a goer, I’ve seen some good uses of these, but finding the right (simple) remote might be an issue.
Both the wall mount and tablet options give me that control, but I wondered if there was a physical device that could be used, like so:-
And with a blueprint you can make it do loads of things, with single, double and long press on both the up and down direction, but frankly even I lose track of whether its a double press or a long press to turn on the extra lamp for example.
I think I might end up using something like this:
On off, is still pretty obvious, with the top and bottom buttons, and its pretty intuitive to long press either of these to dim up or down, and whilst I don’t have full colour wheel control, I can use the side arrows to scroll through some pre defined scenes/colour settings, which is probably good enough.
the strybar is the obvious choice for wireless button
I’m still using the tradfri remote
I think my only complaint with the ikea button is that sometimes you still need to press any button to wake it up first
Not sure if its a firmware difference, or their positioning, but I have two wireless dimmers, and one always shows as offline, but does respond as soon as I press it.
I got a Styrbar yesterday and configured it, working nicely… but it too has this strange offline behaviour.
