I’m considering changing over from a Hue Hub to using ZHA directly with a Conbee II. It looks like this should directly support my Hue bulbs and motion sensors I have now. However, I’m also using some physical switches from RunLessWire. I’m wondering if I’ll be able to use these directly in ZHA. Has anyone used these or other “Friends of Hue” switches? If not, is there a recommended physical switch that works? I like to have something for simple control of lights for guests and my wife.
Nobody’s doing this? I guess I’ll try it and see. I found that Deconz supports them, so it seems that even if ZHA can’t do it directly, I should have a way to get it done.
I have a Conbee II coming this Friday. They’re back in stock at Amazon US.
Update: I didn’t find any way to get these switches to be recognized by ZHA directly. However, they did pair just fine with Deconz and Deconz sends events that can be used in automations.
That’s all great, but it seems they’re less reliable than when I had them tied to my Hue Bridge. I think this may be partially because the Conbee II started out using a different Zigbee channel than the Hue Bridge - but now I don’t really want to change the channel and have to re-pair everything.
As for the reliability issues - I get things like no reaction to button presses and unexpected event codes (like when doing a short press, it’ll throw the event code for the release after a long hold, but it doesn’t even send the code for long hold itself). So I think I’m probably going to move on to looking at battery powered remotes and see if I can get better reliability.
Everything else through Deconz is working great - no issues with communicating with motion sensors or bulbs.
Im currently trying to see if I can get these to work in ZHA. But I cant even figure out how to put it in pairing mode - how did you pair yours to Deconz, did you need to put the switch in pairing mode? If so, how did you do it?
All of the “Friends of Hue” switches apparently work the same way. You have to know your Zigbee channel, and then you have use the correct combo on the switch for the channel. Take a look here: https://phoscon.de/en/support#pairing-friends-of-hue-switch