Howto: Enable Plejd Homekit Double Tap Functionality

Hi everyone!

I wanted to share a setup I’ve implemented at home to make enable use of the double-tap functionality on Plejd light switches while integrating it fully with Home Assistant, without losing the official Plejd app configuration or relying on any third party integration.

Background

I’ve installed Plejd throughout my house and use their bridge with HomeKit to add it as an accessory in Home Assistant. This setup allows me to manage all device configurations as my electrician intended in the official app, while still gaining full Home Assistant integration and without relying on any third party integration.

However, with such a setup there’s one feature that is limited unless you stick entirely to Plejd’s ecosystem: the double-tap functionality on light switches. In Plejd, a double-tap can only activate a preconfigured scene, which is fairly limited:

  1. Scenes can either turn things on or off, not toggle them.
  2. Double taps can only turn on a scene, not turn them off or toggle them.
  3. Can only interact with plejd devices.

I decided to experiment with Plejd’s smart outlet, which costs around €30, to bypass these limitations and use double-tap in a more advanced way with Home Assistant.

My Setup

  • Plejd App Configuration: I created a scene in the Plejd app that turns on the smart outlet. This scene is tied to a double-tap on one of my light switches.
  • Home Assistant Automation: In Home Assistant, I first created a light group helper for table lamps / sconces etc. I then created an automation triggered when the outlet turns on. The automation:
    1. Immediately turns the outlet off again.
    2. Runs a script that checks the state of my light group:
    • If the group is on, the script turns it off.
    • If the group is off, the script turns it on.

This way, I can toggle all my smaller lights with a simple double-tap on the Plejd light switch!

The Trade-Off

Unfortunately, this means the outlet can no longer be used for its primary purpose—it’s now exclusively a sensor to trigger automations. But for me, the added functionality of double-tap toggling all my lights was worth sacrificing one outlet.

Inspiration

I should mention that my Plejd via HomeKit setup was inspired by this post from Hemmastyrning. Also: While I haven’t tried it the GitHub - thomasloven/hass-plejd: 🔹 Plejd BLE integration for Home Assistant integration looks fairly polished and seemingly enables the monitoring of scene activation, due to severe limits in scene functionality I think you would still need to sacrifice one device / outlet to use inside scenes (as they can’t be empty) if you want to have the toggle functionality described above, but I’m guessing one device could possibly be reused in multiple scenes and thus be somewhat less wasteful (as long as you are able to monitor the name of the scene activated).