Every few months I feel like I google this to see if there is a new solution and I can’t seem to find any decent discussion or solution to this. So I figure I’ll ask the community what sort of solutions y’all have come up with for this.
If I had overhead lights I would simply use a smart switch to call it a day, but I don’t. Instead, my spaces are lit with lamps. The catch here is, there are switches on the walls that control outlets instead. this would be fine if I only needed one lamp per room, but one lamp won’t cut it.
Right now, I leave the switch on and use Philips hue bulbs In my lamps. I have dashboards setup for me and my roommates to control the common areas as well as a wall mounted android tablet to control more of the lights and setup actions to turn all of / on.
What I would love is the ability to flip (or tap) a in wall switch that can turn on or off my lamp bulbs. I’ve seen one that does it but it costs nearly $50 and I haven’t seen it in stock anywhere ever really.
Within home assistant, do any of the more main stream in wall smart switches have the ability to simply send a “switch engaged” message that I could use to run a script or turn on / off certain bulbs for instance? I just don’t want to buy one and go through the hassle of installing it and adding it to home assistant and fumbling around in HA to see if this might be possible.
Smart switches generally doesnt like to hang out with smart bulbs. Smart bulb controlled by smart switch will not work. But this maybe might work with neutral wire. I don’t have neutral wire that is connected to my switches, so I don’t know from my personal experience.
What you can do for controlling you smart bulbs is something like magic cube or smart switch like this that will turn on or off smart bulb without turning the lamp off.
as long as you have a neutral wire at the switch you can use the switch as a “relay” and it an control the bulb.
you will need to bypass the existing switch and basically hard-wire the outlet that powers the lamp.
then wire up the switch and leave the output of the switch disconnected (ie don’t connect the output of the switch to anything).
then you can use automations to toggle the bulb on or off when the switch is flipped.
I use this system right now by using a Shelly 1 to control a zigbee bulb in my ceiling fan. The Shelly doesn’t actual control power to anything. I just use the on/off signal to toggle the bulb.
I also use a Shelly 1 wired behind a standard light switch. I have flashed this with esphome and have set it up that on a state change it toggles the light using wifi but I have also added an option that if wifi is down, it will act like a relay switch and physically toggle the power to the bulb.
Alternatively just use a remote control switch like, eg, this. When you press a button it srnds a message to ha, which can do whatever you like with it (including turn on/off a light).
Indeed,Taking into consideration that I needed more then 5 switches I figured that was a 50 cent solution (instead of buying a €20 euro pulse switches each)
And yes, Shelly does the same job.
I have one, but moes was a bit cheaper (although I the later chip sets aren’t that easy to convert to esphome anymnore)
I have the moes, they’re just too thick to fit behind the switch. Still deciding if i need to just install in the ceiling or just add a spacer.
The new ones now’s using cbu chip, which doesn’t even have a pin compatible esp if you need to do a swap. You could still solder wires to each pin but i had a bad experience accidently tearing off the pads. This is where openbeken comes in
