I am about to redo all the switches in my house and was considering (Matter over Wi-Fi Switches) initially the Tapo switches (mainly due to cost) but just found out about Leviton Switches. What I want to do is add a “long press” or “double tap” automation. I can’t find any documentation on this from either manufacture (So I am guessing it is not a feature like the Inovelli switches).
I was wondering if anyone has captured a long press (~1s+) switch depression to trigger an automation. I haven’t used HA yet (currently using Homeseer), but I read someone was able to monitor how long a switch was pressed in HA, which would allow me to create an automation.
Earlier you could often only catch the buttons on the event bus, but with one of the recent releases you can now also catch a state.
The problem is that when looking at the state you only see the last change.
If you look at the event bus you will catch all the changes that comes in rapid succession.
On the event bus you will usually see something like button pressed, button hold, button hold, button hold, button released.
You can react to the ones of these you want, so a button pressed or a button released can be used for normal turn on/off and the button hold can be used for things, like dimming.
The event bus can used as a trigger with an event trigger and you can see the events on the bus in the developer tools’ event tab.
Set * in the listening field and start listening, then click the button and then stop the listening.
You now have a list of all the events that occurred on the event bus in that time and your button events are among those.
Once you find the events you can replace the * with something more precise and thereby filter out unnecessary events.
Wally - Thanks for this great information. This is exactly what I was looking for. I am thinking I could count how many button holds I thought appropriate to consider a trigger time for my event.
So, to be clear, the event bus captures these; button pressed, button hold, button released actions regardless of manufacture and technology. As I said I am looking at the Matter versions of the Tapo and Leviton switches but was curious if this applies across the board. If so, this is very useful.
HA just captures them.
It is the vendors that decide what they report.
Some even report double click and triple click.
Other report a hold with duration and so on.
You have to get or ask on specific buttons to get the exact reports they send to the event bus.
This is out of the hand of the HA team.