Is there a physical smart light switch that will turn the lights on with a short press like normal but also send a trigger to HA with a long press? I have a large garage that I want to light very brightly for working on stuff but I’d prefer if it was normally lit otherwise. My thought is to use a smart switch that I can wire to half the lights and have the switch turn half the lights on as normal. Then wire the other half of the lights using a sonoff or similar smart switch and have a long press on the light switch turn those lights on.
There are quite a few. I use Moes 3 way switches in some places and utilize both the short press to turn on the lights, and a long press to send a signal to HA for other purposes. I am, however, using TASMOTA on all my switches and therefore use rules to send an mqtt message when the switch is long press:
In my case I use the longpress to turn off everything in the house. You can also do double and triple presses as well.
rule3 on power1#state=1 do backlog rule1 0; rule2 1 endon on power1#state=0 do backlog rule1 1; rule2 0 endon on switch2#state=3 do publish stat/masterbedroomlightswitch/action Longpress endon
Thanks for the reply. So, obviously you are flashing Tasmota on the Moes switch. Do I need to tear apart the switch for that? Or can it be flashed OTA?
Does anyone know if I can do this with ESPhome? I can work with Tasmota but all my other switches will use ESPhome.
What about a dumb switch connected to smart hardware?
https://www.leviton.com/en/products/5634-w
Commercial quality, comes in multiple colors, can be used with any decora style plate.
Also, the switch being independent from the control means a single failure is less expensive to fix, and the switch is durable enough that it should NOT be the point of failure
I have one connected to a Shelly i3 to independently control both switches, as I documented here:
https://templates.blakadder.com/ is the best site for finding whether a device can can be flashed OTA. I flashed almost all mine OTA using https://github.com/ct-Open-Source/tuya-convert including the MOES switches. I understand that newer tuya devices may be more difficult to flash OTA. What I like is that I have one way to talk to bulbs, switches, plugs, outlets, and the homebuilt esp devices I have created.
TUYA convert will also flash ESPHome to devices though I have no experience with it.
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I thought about this, my concern with it is that all the lights in the garage will rely on HA being up and working. That hurts the WAF. I’m ok with the “2nd stage” of lights being controlled with HA as long as the “1st stage” will work without it. Plus, I want both “stages” to be smart controlled, so if I hardwired that bottom switch for the WAF it wouldn’t be “smart”.
That depends on how you do it. I am using the i3 to talk directly via http calls to other Shelly devices, bypassing HA completely. They still report their status updates to HA, and HA can still turn them off an on as it pleases, but the i3 is outside of the loop.
In fact, ALL my lighting is outside of the loop, HA and the server on which it runs can be completely dead, and all the lighting still works as expected, only the “extra” lighting remotes I have set up stop working, as they call more complex automations in HA.