I recently came across Home Buttons and ordered the Home Button mini and the Home Button to test them out. And I was somewhat surprised I couldn’t find a post about it here. (I am not affiliated with the maker of these buttons, just someone who bought one and wants to share).
It’s fully open source including hardware and firmware and integrates with Home Assistant via MQTT. It runs its own firmware (ESPhome support was experimented with, but due to unfortunate pin choices, ESPhome isn’t fully compatible due to unfortunate choice of pin assignment for the battery sensor).
Overall, the setup was painless and the documentation (linked above) is terse but complete. Device comes up with own AP, you connect to set up wifi, then configure MQTT and the device automatically gets discovered and included. The buttons support single/double/triple/quadruple clicks and an LED signals back what kind of klick was detected, which helps with learning the timing.
The Home Button mini runs on 2 AA batteries, which should last for 1-2 years according to the docs. The 3d printed housing with compliant cutouts for the buttons is absolutely serviceable.
The icons are material design icons that are served by an icon server run by home-buttons, but its easy enough to have your home assistant server do the icon serving. You configure an icon for a button and its updated the next time the device wakes up. Icons can also be automatically updated via automations if one would be so inclined.
The button functions are set up via automations, and work very straight forward.
There are two special button functions: Press any button for five seconds and you get temperature, humidity and battery level displayed. Press any two buttons for five seconds, and you get buttons to reconfigure wifi, enable the setup web server, restart, or reset the device.
Overall, setting this up took less time than writing this article.
Finally, here is a photo comparing an Aqara Zigbee button, the HomeButton mini, and the larger HomeButton, with a pen for size comparison. The larger HomeButton has an USB-C port and runs off an 18650 battery.
At under 30EUR for the smaller Home Button, and a hair above 50 for the larger Home Button, I find it to be quite a good value for money.
