Light Switch button (physical) advice

Hardware
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1

I would like a physical button which is portable for my kids to turn lights on and off which are connected to home assistant OR hue hub. I have considered following but they don’t quite meet my requirements, is there a solution which meets my requirement of something which is around £10 Max, doesn’t need a hub which is not the hue hub I’m already using for zigbee lighting and doesn’t need frequent battery changes (ie WiFi):

  1. Hue switches (too expensive and tied into hue eco system in future) + one of the bulbs in sons room is a Wyze bulb which relies on cloud polling through HA
  2. Aqara - requires a hub or conbee (which I don’t have)
  3. Shelly button WiFi (would prefer Zigbee as don’t want to be constantly changing batteries and would prefer to have backup of working with hue hub if home assistant fails)
  4. Sonoff zigbee button - requires sonoff bridge? Not hue hub compatible??

I only need two of these, so I ldeally don’t want to spend much or buy a specific hub just for this use case.

Am I missing any potential options? Maybe a WiFi button from Shelly wouldn’t be so bad. Would really appreciate some help. A few people mentioned esphome using a custom made button, that would be new to me but I’d be open to it if it didn’t require a hub/bridge.

2

I think that’s going to be tough to find a button for around 10 quid that you don’t have to build out yourself or that doesn’t need a hub. Even bad ones like the Fibaro Button are a bit pricey. Considering that a wifi board for a PCB (printed circuit board, what you would find in a wifi button) would be 3 quid for a really cheap Chinese one before assembly, cases, switches and markups, I’m not sure you can do it this cheap.

That’s probably why that Shelly Button 1 is 40 quid :wink:. It looks like it perfectly fits the bill though, does everything you want but just four times the budget.

3

IR remotes and IR receiver with a ESP.
That could meet your price range also if you don’t mind getting second hand/thrown away remotes that is free-ish.
If you already have an ESP board in the room(s) then just adding the receiver is not hard or expensive.

The downside is of course the size and look/feel.

4

Thanks for your response. You can get 2 Shelly 1s for €32.50, are they a lot more expensive in the US or something?

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Maybe this is a bargain then. Can’t help thinking that I’ll constantly be changing the batteries though.

5

Yea, they are twice that here.

6

batteries in those are not replaceable, they recharge with a usb port.

since they are wifi there is a delay of up to 7s for it to send the command, but if you leave them plugged into usb power it is near instant

7

Not, necessarily.
I can only recommend getting a ConBee or any other generic ZigBee controller and move all the Hue stuff there and then ditch the Hue hub. I’ve done this around 3 years ago and never looked back. You get acc3ss to so many devices from differwnt manufacturers, e.g. I have Hue, Aqara, IKEA and Osram devicea all controlled by the same hub. The IKEA and Aqara remotes are extremly cheap and have a small form factor.

8

Wow, didn’t know that there are other countries where these are as expensive as they are here in Switzerland xD

9

Thanks for this. I have been thinking for a while that a zigbee hub might be next best move.

But, although I love HA, I would prefer not to be over reliant on HA running smoothly. Currently if my server has issues, the majority of my smart home will continue to work fine with echo voice instruction.

Are there any zigbee hubs which would allow me to connect directly to Alexa and also HA at the same time?

10

Thanks for the feedback. I think that will be too slow for me so maybe I’ll go down the zigbee route further. Kids aren’t that patient. Also the Wyze bulbs (which I got for free, wouldn’t buy) already have a delay of 2 seconds for the cloud polling.

11

FWIW, my HA server runs now for around 4 years and in this time there was only one downtime (apart from the 5 minutes every 3 weeks for updating) when I moved the system from a Pi to a NUC.

Not that I know of.

12

Unsure about Alexa, but with Google Home you can have the Hue hub connected to them both.

If you poll the local API with HA and (sadly) use the Hue web API for Google.
I assume Alexa integration is the same.

13

He already has the Hue hub and I assume he uses Alexa with it.

14

Yeah that’s my current setup, but I can’t find a zigbee button which talks to the hue hub. Tradfri one doesn’t seem to work with Hue like their bulbs. Perhaps I just need to wait for a hue switch discount.

15

What about the Hue Dimmer Switches? They are often sold together with a white bulb for a very good price?

16

I believe I have seen some guides on how to pair them.
I don’t have the IKEA switches so I can’t confirm it but I was looking for compatible switches earlier and found that they could be paired. (I think)

17

Shelly says 2s, but that is dependent on network performance, mine is setup for throughput and reliability with multiple clients, not for reconnection speed, so I get 7s even with a static ip address. That being said, the delay is teaching my kid a valuable lesson in patience. They are also water resistant, in contrast to my 433Mhz portable buttons.

They are surprisingly light on battery use for wifi hundreds of button presses, maybe thousands. Also it supports double/triple press and long press for controlling more stuff, this makes the delay less of a compromise.

I would STRONGLY suggest ditching the Wyze bulbs, even if they were free, and getting a Wiz bulb instead, no more cloud, no proprietary ecosystem, instant response time, then ditch the entire Wyze integration.

18

Thanks Richie. That’s good info.

I’m using Wyze for all my door and window sensors. They’re great and work well with the custom component. But not my best decision ever as I don’t like relying on the custom component as has been proven by the recent security bulletin.

The bulbs on the other hand I have no problem ditching when the time comes, might even stick their lights on some spare zigbee plugs instead just to get this working right. I only like to replace hardware like for like when I absolutely have to for both environmental and money saving reasons.

19

Yeah I know what you mean, Some people saying they do and some they don’t. Don’t think I’ll risk it for tradfri. Might grab some Shelly buttons or wait for some hue switches or buttons to come on offer.

20

Thanks. Yeah I already have some which I could try first too. Don’t find them the easiest device to customise with either hue (no button customisation), Apple homekit (home hub required) or home assistant (complicated mapping with events).