Control smart bulb with touch wall switch

Configuration Zigbee
1

Hi!

I recently bought the new Home Assistant Green with the SkyConnect dongle to try and have one system for everything.

I have (and use) Ikea Tradfri smart bulbs with the Dirigera hub, and while it works well enough, I don’t like not being able to use the actual wall switches, doesn’t feel very smart.

So I went ahead and bought Bseed “stateless” touch wall switches and installed one to test it out. I was successfully able to add it to ZHA, but there’s not much in terms of configuration - I can only toggle it on or off, or try to write some value in “manually” using the Clusters configuration. My device is correctly identified as TS0011
by _TZ3000_hafsqare, so I guess this is just how it’s supposed to be.

I’ve read through the documentation for ZHA as well as some on automation, but the learning curve seems very steep to me, and somehow it is much harder to “just somehow make it work” than I expected it to be.

What I’d like to achieve is the following:

  • control the on / off state of the bulb using the wall touch switch, this has several steps:

    • the actual power state of the switch has to always stay on, so the wall switch won’t actually cut the power off from the bulb
    • the switch has a light to signal whether it’s on or off, I’d like for this to still work, ideally even when someone turns the bulb on via other means - so it’d basically be synchronized to the state of the bulb
    • pressing the switch would actually run some automation to turn the bulb on / off

  • still be able to control the advanced things (brightness, hue) from the Apple Home app (now I use the Ikea integration, but I’ll unpair the bulbs, add them through ZHA and integrate them via HomeKit Bridge)

Is what I’m trying to achieve possible? If so, how could I go about achieving this?

Thanks a lot!

2

To add some more information, these are the switches in question:

I also have a version with 3 2-way switches in one panel, but that one is not on the website atm.

I chose them mostly because I want to have all switches with the same design, and I have places where I need to put 2 or 3 of them next to each other. These were the only Zigbee brand I could find that provides “covers” (not sure about the terminology, sorry) like that, 2 or 3 of the single switch covers wouldn’t fit next to each other.

I chatted with their support and it seems like they don’t provide this “decoupled” functionality out of the box. Is that something I could add via some ZHA quirks, or is overriding the “HW functionality” too much to ask?

Other approach I could see is to somehow “group” the switch and the bulb(s) it controls together and export it to Apple Home as a single device, and handle these cases manually:

  • If someone turns the switch off manually, the power would actually cut off
  • If someone turns the switch on manually, an automation would set the bulbs to a state I want to
  • If someone turns the “light” on via the app, a script would make sure the switch is on, and then handle the bulb settings
  • If someone turns the “light” off via the app, I guess it could just turn the switch off to stay consistent

Does that make sense? Besides the bulbs not always being the fastest to turn on after power has been cut off, is there more negatives to this approach? I guess my Zigbee network will be flaky, but I have a small apartment where the hub is right in the middle of it, and the total count of my devices is <50 (~25 bulbs, 3 LED controllers, and now these switches).

What would be the best way to handle this in HA? I’d love for this logic to be reusable.

I’m also not against buying new switches if someone can recommend good ones, but they would have to:

  • be up to EU standards (honestly not sure if these are)
  • support no-neutral wire
  • have these variants where 2 and 3 switches are next to each other
  • ideally, I’d prefer rocker switches to touch ones, but didn’t find any that would fit

I also though about using the Zigbee controllers with normal switches, but my wall sockets are only ~4cm deep, and it didn’t seem like it would fit.

Thanks for all the suggestions and discussion!