Need ideas how to use Busch Jäger Wall switches (which are great!)

Hardware
1

Hi folks,

this will be my first post here so allow me to introduce myself.
I’m working in the computer science (mostly (BSD-)Unix) for more than 30 years so I have a little experience and live in Germany, so expect strange wording and many mistakes in my english, I’ll do my best.

My journey to HASS (it’s the German word for hate, you know :slight_smile: started with a growing Philips HUE setup which made it necessary to use a second HUE bridge and deploying an Osram lightify controller because osram devices are not working well with HUE bridges.

Having three zigbee networks now (HUE bridge 1.floor, HUE bridge 2.floor, Osram controller) was a strong force too search for a managment tool. So I found home assistant a few weeks ago.

Enough introduction, now my question:

I love this Busch Jäger wall switches. They are available in dozends of different colors and forms and are very smart: Description

These wall switches can build their own zigbee network or can join an existing network.
They don’t need any bridges or controller and are zigbee routers.
The wall switches can learn the status of up to 20 zigbee devices in the network and store it.

You use home-assistant, the HUE app or whatever to create your lighting scene, then you ask the wall switch to store the status (on/off, brightness, color) of the devices you want to switch.

An eight key wall switch can store 8 complete scenes or 4 dimmable scenes with all possible mixtures.
You need two keys for a dimmable setup.

A HUE bridge polls the lights every 60 seconds so even the HUE app shows the correct state after using the wall street after a short delay.

To make things even better: They are real wall switches too, they can switch or dimm the direct attached lights by switching the power and this can be controlled via zigbee.

My familiy loves this wall switches They have a build in night light in three possible colors (dark red, light red, green) so they are perfect for the sleeping rooms and you can switch light configurations like “TV”, “sleeping”, “reading”, … with the press of a key and control up to 20 lights per switch with one press of a key.

Now to my problem:
I have now three independent zigbee networks ( 2 x HUE, Osram ) so the wall switch can only control the devices in the network they joined.

My first idea was adding a zigbee radio to my home assistant computer and set up a fourth zigbee network with the home assistant system and the wall switches in it and let home assistant control everything else after reading the wall switch key press.

Now the problem:
HASS’s zigbee (zha) recognize the wall switches as binary switches.
To make things worse:
The eight key wall switch is recognize as four “ON” and four “OFF” switches.
In the zigbee debug I see that pressing the OFF key sends something to HASS but a off binary switch is still off after receiving the off key.

I focus now on the idea of getting somewhere virtual zigbee lights. I need 8 virtual lights for each (8 key) wall switch.
I use the smart network scan of the Busch Jäger device to learn to control one virtual light for each of the phyiscal keys and monitor the state of this virtual lights from HASS to trigger automations.

But I don’t have virtual lights…

And I have no idea whether I can told HASS/zha to act as a zigbee end device to be direct controlled from the wall street…

Or i don’t see the forrest because all is full of trees…

Any good ideas how I can solve my problem? It’s enough to get all key presses as triggers in HASS.

Thanks in advance,

2

I think your switches are very similar to the Xiaomi Switches (or this one). Though in contrast to your device the channels are displayed as binary sensors with the pure wireless version I have. Which doesn’t make too much sense as well. Essentially those kind of devices fire events once they are pressed. So technically they should be simple buttons (like an OK button which doesn’t have a state).
Applied to your device, the 8 switches all should send some sort of “I have been pressed” event when you click them. Because they don’t really have a state they instantly flip back to the off-position in your case.

This is how the Xiamo Switches are used in automations:

trigger:
    platform: event
    event_type: click
    event_data:
      entity_id: binary_sensor.wall_switch_left_0011223344
      click_type: single
  action:
    service: light.toggle
    entity_id: light.somelight

If I’m correct, then you should observe the HASS log for what kind of event each of your 8 buttons is firing when you press it. Based on that you can automate the buttons similar to my example. And probably without virtual lights. Essentially with this event based approach each button is assigned to a target state you want a given light (or group of light, that’s up to you) to be in. This may also require to not directly apply the button-logic in other apps. Let’s say you have configured button 1 to turn on a light. If HASS listens to this event and calls an automation, then you have two actions happening. So you have to decide which “control unit” evaluates the button presses and performs the actions.

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