I’m migrating from SmartThings, and I have a method of controlling lights that I’m having trouble replicating in HASS. Or maybe there’s a better/different way to do it that I’m just not thinking of.
In my basement I have a ton of lighting, and all the light circuits are controlled by in-wall Z-wave switches. I have successfully setup scenes for these in HASS, and have no problem controlling the scenes with HASS.
I also have an in-wall loadless Z-wave auxiliary switch. It isn’t connected to any lights, it just has an up/down paddle. In the past I’ve used this as the master “all on” or “all off” switch – tap on the top and all the lights go to full, tap bottom and they all turn off, no matter what state the aux switch is in. This is very handy for quickly switching off all the basement lights as you leave to go upstairs. The state of the aux switch itself is irrelevant, if you tap on the bottom all the lights go off.
How would I accomplish this in HASS? From the little bit of experimenting I’ve done so far with automation, it only seems to be able to take action when a switch changes state. Whereas in SmartThings, I could listen for a specific event (the aux switch being pressed up or down) regardless of what state it was currently in.
Have you checked the log to see what state information is being sent when you touch the paddle either way? If you post it we might be able to figure out a way to help.
That’s what’s odd. I’m not getting anything in my logs when I physically tap the switch.
However, it shows up in my device list. And when I toggle it using HASS’ UI, the physical switch responds (it has a little LED showing if it’s on or off) and all the lights go on and off like they should via the automation rule.
So it’s like the switch can RECEIVE from HASS, but HASS isn’t detecting anything when the switch itself sends a signal.
I’m not quite sure how that’s relevant. I already have all my basement lights in a group, I use the group commands all the time.
Hmmm. How did that actually work in ST? Did you have a specific SmartApp for it? Some ZWave devices don’t report state very well and need to be polled, but itf this was working in ST then that can;t be it.
It was relevant for the question you asked. As it turns out, the question you asked wasn’t actually the answer you were looking for. The question you are asking is why isn’t my physical switch sending states to HA, when it seems to receive states.
It worked using (most recently) their first-party “Smart Lighting” app. I was able to tell it that whenever a certain switch was turned on (the aux loadless switch, in this case), also turn these other switches on. It worked great and 100% reliably – one of the few things on that platform that did.
I remember from fiddling around with SmartApps when I was still kind of invested in SmartThings that there were two kinds of events I could react to: the switch changed state, or someone pressed the “up” paddle on the switch (regardless of what state it’s in). I guess I’m wondering if HASS is currently capable of making that distinction.
Right now it appears it can’t get any sort of signal in HASS from that switch, so I’m still trying to hunt that down. While troubleshooting, I experienced some other very weird behavior (another loadless aux switch was causing a light to turn on even though there are no automation rules linking the two) so I’m still trying to eliminate other possibilities.