So murphy’s law also applies to IoT I see. Just as I thought I was over my major hurdles I ran into new problems.
I am trying to use an esp8266 with tasmota as a two relay switch, which would be similar to a T1 two gang sonoff switch.
It seems I got lucky and got my desired effect by accident. The two relay shield I got are inverted relays, basically with power (over 2 v) they are “off” and with no power they turn on. I tried to set up Led1 to one pin and Led2 to another pin but noticed it didn’t work. After some quick research seems the T1’s relay LEDs’ are connected to the same pin as the relay. I wanted each LED to be “off” when light was on, and “on” when light was off. Because I am using inverted relays that is what I got.
I might be wrong, but seems selecting Led2 or Led3 doesn’t do anything. I set up a similar switch with only one Led set up as Led1. Each time any of the two relays is on, the light turns on, and if both relays are off the Led is off. If I do set up a second led on a different pin as Led2, one would think it would toggle with relay 2 but it doesn’t.
The other problem I noticed, that perhaps someone has found a work around is when using the Belkin Wemo emulation. If I remember correctly, if I don’t set up the tasmotas to emulate Belkin Wemo’s, HA is able to see the switch and control it via MQTT, but Alexa doesn’t recognize it. If I want Alexa to control everything that HA can do, there is a way to set it up but I either need to forward ports to my HA (which I can’t do), or I would have to use something like the HA could service for a $5 a month fee.
With “single” relay switches, emulating Belkin Wemo works just fine. HA picks up both signals (for lack of a better word), and Alexa finds the Belkin Wemo and allows me to control it. However with the two relay switch, when I set it up to emulate Belkin Wemo, only one of the relay names gets discovered, and it doesn’t work well. If I turn on the belking wemo switch on HA light turns on but the switch then slides back to off but the light stays on. If I use the mqtt switch on HA for the same switch, it works property but the other switch (Belkin Wemo) doesn’t catch up/get updated.
So it seems that if I want to use Alexa without HA cloud and without being able to forward ports I can’t set up two relays on the same chip otherwise Belkin Wemo stops working. Is this fact or something else I can change on my configuration to fix the problem?
And finally a question about wiring. So I thought I would be able to fit all the parts into the existing switch box but that is not going to happen. Looks like I will have to put the hardware up in the ceiling and run wires down to the switch box for the actual switch and Led’s. For one switch I need 5 wires, 3.3.v, ground, switch 1 output, switch 2 output and Led input. Instead of trying to pull 5 different wires, could I use cat5 cable instead? With cat5 cable I would have 8 wires to play with. And if I can use cat5 wire are there suggestions on which way would it be better, ie 3.3v and ground on the same twisted pair, or perhaps make sure the 3.3.v is not twisted with ground, etc.
Like always thanks in advance for any and all help