Easier way to managing stateless buttons in HA

Feature Requests
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#1

So, I have like 30 smart switches that have 4 buttons each and each button has 3 triggers (single, double and long press), that’s 360 possible automations there.

Since I have both smart switches and smart bulbs, and since HA doesn’t create entities for stateless buttons, I have no easy way of grouping them in order to maintain or just see the automations that each button does.

It would be awesome if HA would have a dedicated dashboard or interface for managing these types of smart switches/buttons.

Before someone says that smart switches and smart bulbs shouldn’t be used together, my smart switches are really SMART. If they are connected to a dumb bulb they will act like a normal smart light switch (and create an entity), but you can set them to keep the power always on (you can do that for each of the 4 circuits individually) and they became smart stateless buttons to invoke an automation. So, they work great with smart and dumb bulbs, and if anyone is interested the switches are these ones from Terncy:
https://terncy.com/en-us/wallswitch-withneutral/
https://terncy.com/en-us/wallswitch-noneutral/

#2

Can you explain what you mean by ‘stateless’ switches, because what you’re saying doesn’t make sense to me. All entities can be managed or grouped, so your definition of stateless switches doesn’t really translate into HA lingo.

1 Like
#3

Do you mean stateless buttons?

Switches always have a state. Buttons never have a state. They generate events.

If the smart “switches” truly are just buttons internally then I’m not sure how HA could generate a state for them.

I guess you could create template switches for each one based on button presses, etc. but I’m not even sure I would know what that would look like.

How does a state differentiate between a single or double press? Or a long press and then a release event that some buttons provide?

#4

Sorry, I edited the post to make it clearer.

They are actually switches (when connected to dumb bulbs) that can be set to function as stateless buttons if you desire.

So, if I have a smart bulb connected to it, I can choose to keep the power always on and that on/off switch becomes a stateless smart button with 3 triggers.

In my case, I’m using them as stateless buttons since my lightbulbs are also smart, that way I need to create an automation for each button to toggle the respective lightbulb on or off.

#5

Yes, the correct term would be stateless buttons, sorry.

That’s not what I’m trying to achieve, what I wanted would be an interface to facilitate the visualization of the automations created for each button.

For exemple:
Living room wall switch:
Button1 - single press: automation 1
Button1 - double press: none
Button1 - long press: automation 2
Button2 - single press: automation 6
(…)
Kitchen wall switch:
Button1 - single press: automation 4
Button1 - double press: automation 9

#6

So these show up as button entities? If you use the area card, it basically does what you’re looking for. It’ll show all entities (including automations) related to that area. Also, if you click the automation it’ll tell you related entities as well.

Lastly, you can make a blueprint that assigns button presses to actions in a single automation. So there’s no guessing as to which automation goes to which button. Each button will have 1 automation with n actions.

#7

Post a screenshot of the integration page, the devices page with all the devices, and one of the devices page from the page after that.

It will make it much clearer.

It’s an interesting problem.

Also worth reading the homekit controller integration(I don’t mean you Diego, you seem like you have read it)

And don’t forget to vote for your own request!