Remote control / keypad for HA

Hardware
1

Hello,

I’m looking for any suggestions for a remote controller that I can use for triggering automations in HA. I currently use Philips Hue light controllers but I’m looking for something a little fancier and perhaps more buttons so that I don’t have to remember to double click button 3 to do xyz.

For the RPi followers - I could go with a Keybow and Pi Zero W to trigger webhooks but that looks a little chunky.

I fully accept I’m looking for style over substance here.

Any ideas?

thanks

2

If you want fancy, how about a Stream Deck?

There is even a Home Assistant plugin:

3

Thanks - I was thinking about a Stream Deck. From a quick read of that GitHub I guess the Stream Deck would have to be plugged in to a PC running the Stream Deck software.

An idea I was exploring was if I could get a Stream Deck to run on a Raspberry Pi or Pi Zero. I did a quick search and only found CompanionPi which only works on a 4B and seems quite dedicated to video. I see a couple of other Linux options but they don’t confirm RPi. I will dig a bit further in this direction.

4

Oh, hold that thought.

https://python-elgato-streamdeck.readthedocs.io/en/0.9.3/index.html

is ‘an open source Python 3 library to control an Elgato Stream Deck directly’. That could be interesting…

5

I use a few old Android phones as wireless pads

6
7

I’ve also tried the old phone route, definitely works but I think I’m looking for something a bit more mechanical.
Stream-Pi gets no marks for user friendliness for expalining their offering. Anyway, one would have to make a RPi based keypad, and then run a server on another machine.
I think I’ll go with a Zigibee controller for now, such as this
Zemismart ZM-RM02
image

and then work on the Python scripting for the Stream Deck.

Thanks for the suggestions.

8

Have you considered xfinity keypad?

https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/devices/XHK1-UE.html

9

Ah, that one looks better. I must have got bored scrolling through the list before I got to that one.
Thanks.