Simple Home Assistant compatible alternative to Lutron Aurora switches?

[GollyJer (Jeremy Gollehon)]

The Lutron Aurora is the perfect controller for our rental. I’ve used them successfully with the Hue Hub and recently moving to Home Assistant thought they would be easy to use as well.

I am wrong. They are pretty much the most painful thing to get working.

Are there other options for on/off and spin to dim/brighten that “just work” with Home Assistant AND have the nice ability to install over the top of traditional old-school light switches?

[Daniel15]

How have you configured them? They work mostly okay for me using Zigbee2mqtt. You can bind them directly to a light which is a bit more reliable. I have some directly bound to individual lights, and some using Node-Red

My main issue with the Aurora is how they handle dimming and the fact that if you turn off the light with Home Assistant, you need to press the Aurora’s button twice to turn it back on. That’s an issue with the device itself rather than an issue with Home Assistant. I wrote a more detailed comment about that here:

@Daniel15

@elegallais

I’ve been using that blueprint for a few months now. Works weel, there is only one problem.

If you use the home assistant app to turn on a light (or if you turn on the light through an automation), using the Lutron switch will not work, you have to press it twice, e.g.:

1. Turn on light in HA app
2. Press Lutron Aurora
3. Nothing happens
4. Press Lutron Aurora a second time
5. Light turns off

Is there any way this can be fixed? (I wouldn’t mind changing my automations…)

This is one of my frustrations with the Lutron Aurora. The issue is that it has its own local state on the device itself, which it treats as the source of truth, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to push updates to it to sync it with the Home Assistant state.

If you turn on a light in Home Assistant, the Aurora thinks that the light is still off. When you press it, it’s sending a “turn on light” message (in reality it actually sends a “set brightness to 255”) but the light is already on! That’s why it takes two presses — the second time, it actually knows that the light is on.

There’s a similar issue with dimming, in that the current dimmer value is stored on the device too, and brightness is sent as an absolute value (i.e. “set brightness to 150”) rather than a relative value (i.e. “decrease brightness by 30”). If you dim the light in Home Assistant, the Aurora still thinks that the brightness is the old value, so if you turn it to dim/brighten, it will start from the old brightness, as if you had never changed it in Home Assistant.

Other devices use a “toggle” event for press, and two separate brightness increase and brightness decrease events for dimming, which ends up being more flexible. The Aurora only sends “set brightness to x” events.

Not sure about ZHA but I use Zigbee2MQTT and there’s no way to differentiate button presses from brightness changes, as the payloads look the same

@GollyJer

AND have the nice ability to install over the top of traditional old-school light switches?

The Lutron Aurora is the only one I’ve seen, unfortunately. That’s probably why it’s so expensive - no competition that’s quite the same.

[MagickKitsune]

I recently decided to ditch the Hue hub and moved all of my Hue lights and accessories to Zigbee2MQTT.

The move was mostly smooth, except the switches.
I decided to install and learn AppDaemon, because it’s a lot easier to write the complex automations to get them to work how I want.

I got them all working, including my two auroras, but those still have problems. I’m planning to replace all of the light switches in the house with z-wave smart switches, but most don’t have a neutral, so I’m stuck with something like the auroras until I can run new cables.

When I get home I’ll dig into it more and try to resolve the issues, or go back to the drawing board. I’d love to write a custom Z2M converter / ZHA quirk, but those may be beyond my skill level. Otherwise, I’m thinking about just using templates or AppDaemon to add an event entity to the device.

[bob.t (Bob)]

With a primarily ZHA home setup, the only reason I’d delve into Zigbee2MQTT now would be for the Aurora’s. I’d make the effort to get up to speed with that, but at this point I feel I should slow down and just study what I’ve been able to get working so far - without a better understanding of what I’ve managed to get working to date.

That is to day, I just wanted to relate my appreciation for your efforts and the update.