I’m currently using Home Assistant as a “one ring to rule them all” passing devices from different manufacturers/ecosystems through to HomeKit where my family uses scenes, automations etc. to actually control things. With this, I’ve set up Zigbee2mqtt for all my zigbee devices. This is working great for almost everything—except for a Hue Dimmer remote, and a couple EnOcean Green Power (RunLessWire) “switches” that behave as remotes.
These devices, when previously integrated with HomeKit through a Hue bridge, exposed buttons with clear names that I could easily assign scenes/automations to in HomeKit. Ex: “Button 1 - Short Press,” or “Button 1 - Long Press.” After a bit of work, I was able to get them set up in a similar way through Home Assistant by passing them through to HomeKit as device triggers. However, I’ve run into a variety of issues that make me think there must be a better way to do it that I’m missing.
- The “Button” events don’t have names corresponding to what actually triggers them (“short press” vs “long press” vs “hold” in the case of the Hue remote). They’re just numbered.
- The “Button” events don’t actually show up in HomeKit until they’re pressed and the bridge is reloaded—and they’re numbered not based on any consistent order, but by which one was pressed “first” on setup. So, if you go to set one up and press button “2” before button “1”, congrats, button “2” is now button “1.” This is annoying, but with trial and error I was able to make it work. However…
- Every time I update the Home Assistant docker container, I have to re-do setup for these devices in HomeKit—because the “buttons” disappear in HomeKit until they’re all pressed again, the bridge is reloaded, and the buttons are re-assigned their scenes.
I’ve seen that perhaps I should be using MQTT Device triggers instead of normal Device Triggers, but to be honest, that documentation isn’t really fleshed-out enough for me to figure out what needs to be done or whether it will ultimately result in what I want. I’m happy to put in the legwork, but I’m missing the context necessary to figure out what to do with it/whether it will do what I want.