The Philips Hue Tap dial is an extremely versatile ZigBee remote control, ordinarily used to govern lights using the Hue system.
The device has four buttons, labeled (in what appears to be Braille but isn’t) 1 through 4, which ordinarily are used to recall scenes in the Hue system. In addition to the buttons, the Hue Tap dial also has — very apropos — a dial. This dial has very fine-grained déténtes; it clicks as you spin it, and they offer a minimal, if comfortable and reassuring resistance.
In the Home Assistant universe, the Hue Tap dial is compatible with both ZigBee4MQTT and ZigBee Home Automation. In Home Assistant’s ZHA, when you actuate the device’s buttons, the Hue Tap dial produces zha_event events . Rotation of the dial also produces up / down events, with a rotation “angle” associated to them (rotations do not produce start and end rotation events like, for example, the SYMFONISK knob from IKEA — this device’s events are discrete, more on that below in the Caveats section).
These events are directly usable in automations, but there is no support for double-tap or triple-tap of the buttons, and these types of ZHA events are cumbersome to use in automations, generally speaking. For that reason, I’ve devised a Node-RED subflow which converts raw events from the Hue Tap dial into usable messages — and it also adds double- and triple-tap functionality to the scene buttons, multiplying the amount of things you can make the dial do for you.
With this thing you can do things like use the dial to simultaneously control volume, seek your song or TV show back and forth, and also skip chapters or jump to the next song in your playlist.
Check out the full article, code for your Node-RED instance, and documentation on the node, right here:
This grew out of a need similar to what is expressed in this project:
