When I bought these, I thought I was getting a pretty great deal that no one knew about yet, turns out, everyone knew something we didn’t.
I was envisioning a touchscreen light switch that could be set to have scenes available on the primary (or even other) screen and a hard switch, in case it was needed. What I got was a hard switch with a touch screen hard switch or physical dimmer, which will kill a fan.
I have RF (controlled by Bond) fans with zigbee bulbs in every room, all of it in HA, why won’t the Orvibo hardware, or even the app, see the rest of the devices and allow us to add them to the hardware‽‽ It’s really frustrating.
I’ve replaced many of my switches with the MixPad D1 when it was on sale for $50 on Amazon.
I was thinking the simplest initial workaround that would avoid tinkering with the hardware, might be to create a virtual ORVIBO device in HA that could be added to the ORVIBO app via QR code or Bluetooth (avoiding the complexities of matter) so the D1 could expose the virtual device switch on its screen and we could use it to trigger anything in HA, even a binary on/off virtual switch would be useful for activating HA automations.
They look great, have a responsive beautiful bright display, a robust processor, speaker, far field microphone (with wake-word support), local control via matter, a Flutter based UI, etc. Tons of potential for becoming a powerful HA control panel.
I was hoping the D1s could display and control my Home Assistant scenes and devices, but it’s not possible right now using Matter or the ORVIBO app with Alexa/Google integration.
I would be VERY interested in getting that functionality working.
I currently have my D1s paired via Matter to Home Assistant and paired to my Google Home devices directly through the ORVIBO integration, which seems more stable and exposes scenes created in the ORVIBO app and allows my other D1s to display their controls on every other switch, but the proprietary scenes are useless since I have no other ORVIBO devices.
Maybe somebody could at least create a HA ORVIBO virtual device switch that could be manually paired with the ORIVIBO app, which seems to use a QR code or Bluetooth for pairing.
I was tipped off to this device from @efirestone, and spent some time over the last year+ getting Compose UI running so that we could build our own app for this switch. Compose UI is Android’s new UI toolkit written in Kotlin, but has since been ported to run on Desktop, iOS, and the web… and now on this device!
The result is that we can now deploy our own Kotlin-based app that does whatever we want. Eventually I hope to make this a bit more turn-key so that anyone could build an app, but for now the app has to be embedded in the project which sets up the rendering and device interaction and such. Unfortunately what I did is not really for end-users just wanting to get the switch tied into HA, but more for programmers wanting to put a custom app into their wall.
I know Eric has big plans for his switches including things like HA integration as both a device but also a client controlling the rest of his house. I have modest plans for mine.
While disappointing that you haven’t got an end user solution to make these function quite yet, it sounds like you’ve at least worked out a path to a solution. I look forward to seeing what is possible with this revelation!
It really blows my mind how all of the single and double gang solutions that I’ve seen in the last 5 or so years, come from these companies that really dig their heels in and refuse to open up an api or some other friendly solution. Orro, which had the same single gang decora form factor took too long just to announce they would have an api and then a year or so later with nothing to show for that, they went away. Brilliant, if I heard correctly, is looking for a buyer. And now this. I’ve had one of these controlling the light to our cedar closet in the basement for over a year now. Kept thinking to myself that they’d eventually see the light. I guess Matter lets them off the hook so to speak. But what a waste of huge potential.
I just bought 2 MixPad D1 devices.
Updated them to the latest version.
Added in HomeAssistant through Matter.
Am I the only one having a hard time controlling dimming percentage value in Home Assistant?
When I try to change the dimming value from home assistant, the dimmer value in the UI starts moving erratically. The dimmer itself isn’t responding very well and takes a very long time to stabilize. Sometimes, I think the desired value commanded from Home Assistant is never quite reached.
Toggling on and off works as intended.
I know all things Matter is pretty much beta all around, I was just wondering if there could be something wrong with my units.
Way ahead of me… I’ve yet to succeed adding this to HA as a Matter device. Always errors out on me. From what I’ve read in the past the only thing that carries over from this device via Matter is the lighting? Is this still the case?
Unfortunately, yes. It appears as a binary or dimmer switch only. But it would be a fantastic first step if other HA devices could be controlled from the D1 touchscreen as virtual switches (obviously the ultimate dream is running a custom dashboard/wake-word/etc).
It would still be great to have HA scenes and devices appear on the D1 touchscreen.
Since the Orvibo app does allow additional Orvibo brand device types and additional Mixpad D1 switches to have their controls appear on any other D1 touchscreen, perhaps someone could hack together a way for Home Assistant to create emulated Orvibo virtual switches that could be recognized in the Orvibo app as if they were native devices.
Then any HA device could be controlled on the Orvibo D1 touchscreen.
How I managed to add them to HA:
1- Update MixPad to their latest firmware.
2- Reset MixPad to factory
3- In MixPad’s setup wizard, skip initial app pairing
4- Go into MixPad’s settings “Connect to App”
5- Click on Matter
6- Scan QR code with mobile device, through the HA Companion app as per HA documentation. I used an old iPad.
7- Node will be added to your Home Assistant Matter section in your Devices list
8- (Optional) Go back to MixPad’s “Connect to app” settings and pair with Orvibo’s mobile app.
I now have 3 of these Mixpads and they all worked out fine.
I do have all of them on a separate VLAN with only my HA instance having local access to it but I doubt this is necessary to just make them work. I just don’t want Chinese Android devices snooping on my LAN. It’s bad enough they have a mic built-in!
Once you configure them via Matter and latest fw, does everything still work locally on the device? That is, only the automation access is affected - runs via matter network?
Matter is a locally controlled focused protocol so yeah, it works without internet connectivity. You can control what’s exposed to home assistant via the Matter endpoints.
You do lose some features by blocking internet access to them like Calendar, Clock and Weather data.
You also cannot configure the intercom feature as this require the mobile app. I haven’t tested if once configured, the intercom feature works without cloud connectivity but I suspect it will as the devices seem to be using mDNS to detect each others.
