My daughter is getting bigger now, but is still much too short to reach the light switch in her room, but I would like to give her the ability to turn her light on and off. The switch for her light is a Leviton Z-wave dimmer. The ideal way woudl be to set up some kind of simple switch that when pressed, toggles the lights state, but I can’t seem to find anything out there that would do that.
Does anyone have any ideas how one might set up some kind of simple, battery operated button or switch that when operated, sends a signal to the Z-Wave controller, which the controller then does what it’s supposed to for that particular switch/button?
It has the advantage that you could progam different buttons for different light levels etc. if you want to get that complex, and it works well with Hass once you get it set up right (how tos are available in the forum)
Not really all that fast, but the Amazon Dash button would do this. I have one at each door and when pressed, they flip a few input.boolean and either set the house away or home depending on whichever state was last tripped.
We’ll see how long the batteries last, but using them at least once a day, they have lasted almost a year uncontested so hopefully they’ll last a while longer.
The Minimote could potentially work, but the Dash does look more along the lines of the general idea I’m looking for.
Which one did you get (There are over 100 pages of the thing, each for a different product)? Did you have to ‘hack’ it or anything to get it to work with your system? It seems to me like it’s meant to reach out to Amazon and work its ‘magic’, but in theory, if hacked, it could cut out Amazon and send a command to the location of your choice.
The Octan looks nice - but unfortunately, it does not appear to be available in the US. The Dash would be perfect - if it wasn’t such a pain to implement. Most of what I’ve found indicates you need to trick it by having a process or your firewall intercept its requests and then in turn do something else. If it was possible to reprogram it (Might happen someday, as someone HAS done a reprogram of one with a real rudimentary program) so that the button press sends a specific command to a specific address and that’s it, then it would be great. I know there is their IOT one for $20, and that COULD work, but I don’t want it going to or relying on their ‘cloud’.
Nexa doorbell would probably work OK for turning lights on/off (its 433mhz RF so should be able to integrate with HA, I use it via Telldus atm, but will probably try to integrate it along with my other 433mhz switches and sensors eventually)
It looks like they’re just launching in the USA now. There’s also the Aeon Labs panic button, which is a keyfob style remote.
When they solve the challenges with the Fibaro Button (see elsewhere on the forum) that’ll likely be a good choice. Alternatively, there are various battery powered wall switches (GE, Cooper and many others from a quick Google search). You could mount one of those at her height fairly easily.
I was thinking about this and how it seems that most of the remotes act as secondary controllers on the network. Why hasn’t anyone made a remote that acts like a simple sensor (or ‘collection’ of sensors) so that a button press just sends a message to the controller over the Z-Wave network and what is done with that message is up to how the controller is set up to handle it. To that end, what I had thought about was maybe a battery operated door switch. When pressed, it sends a message to the controller, then set the controller to toggle a light state when that sensor changes state.
I was thinking about this some more. It really seems that at this point in time, there is literally nothing that is really up to the task of what I’m looking for. It seems that they all have one of two similar problems - due to being battery powered, they go to sleep to save power and only wake up when a button is pressed, which for most of us, wouldn’t be a big deal, but for a toddler, when it doesn’t react, there will be 1000 more button presses (which is related to the second issue related to the Dash where it may send the command on the first button press, but it may take a few seconds to do so).
I did pick up a few dash buttons, one of which I might actually use for its intended purpose, the other I’m going to ‘attempt’ to hack, but that will likely be a huge uphill battle for me.
But my other thought was since I have several RPis (original, Mod B and v2) laying dormant, what would it take to set one up with a simple button wired to it to GPIO pins and when the button is pressed, it sends a command to HA which HA then interprets as ‘toggle this light’?