I recently bought a couple of Sonoff Slamphers and Sonoff PIR’s. I have a couple of dark areas that already had the old style PIR built into the inline socket in a dumb switch version. One was failing giving random on/off results and driving us nuts, so replacement was in order. Of course I needed to run it all thru Home Assistant.
My first try got rather complicated. The Home Assistant after version .80 had the binary sensor MQTT set-up modifies so that there can only be 2 codes per entity. Using the 433mhz switching thru the Sonoff RF bridge worked differently. You get 1 topic and it sends the multitude of codes from 433 sensors thru this same topic. If you have an RF bridge you may notice a lot of warnings popping up when a code comes thru. If you have say 6 binary sensors set-up in your system coding thru the RF-Bridge and one code is sent into it, you will get the response of the 1 sensor in Home Assistant, but in the HA system log you will see warning messages from the other 5 sensors stating that this code does not match on or off for this topic. To stop this I have built several things to code around that, and this is one of them.
You see the Sonoff Slampher has the ability to read an RF signal directly as sent from a 433 device. I thought I could load the code and go. Ha ha, no such luck…
I flashed Tasmota onto the Slampher and plugged it all in, fired up the PIR. I followed the Sonoff instructions to pair the devices and it worked! The PIR sensor saw me and the light came on. 10 seconds later the PIR sensor saw me again and the light turned off. It was toggling the light on and off every time the code came in. Well, that’s no good. At that point I felt inspired by Digiblur’s (Thanks Travis!) mastery of Tasmota rules and decided I should be able to do this with rules. Here is my solution.
First, as I said, I flashed Tasmota onto the Slamphers. I got my information on how to do that from the Tasmota site. Once I got the device running and the web interface up, I added all my network information into the configuration, and I pulled in the template for #9 Slampher from the Tasmota website. So far so good.
After playing for a while, I came up with this new Template:
{"NAME":"SlampherSpltRF","GPIO":[17,255,0,255,0,0,0,0,22,56,0,0,21],"FLAG":0,"BASE":9}
It turns out that the device has an RF radio internally that is tied to Button1/GPIO0/POWER1 internally. What I did was move GPIO12 (connected to the main relay) onto POWER2, and change POWER1 on another unused GPIO pin. Then I can ‘interrupt’ the input from the RF swirtch and trigger it whenever I want to instead of on every toggle of the RF.
Here are the rules that make this happen:
rule1 on power1#state=1 do power2 on endon on power2#state=1 do ruletimer5 300 endon on Rules#Timer=5 do power2 off endon
What rule1 does is waits for the RF signal to fire power1 and when it does, that fires power2 which is the light bulb turning on. It then starts a 5 minute timer. When the timer expires, power2 turns off.
rule2 on power1#state=1 do ruletimer4 5 endon on Rules#Timer=4 do power1 off endon
What rule 2 does is waits for power1 to turn on, then sets a different 5 second timer and turns power1 off when that expires. This resets the slampher to recieve another RF signal of ON and ignore OFF.
In effect the light now will only respond to the RF switch turning the light on, and will always turn the light off after 5 minutes.
Here is a debug log of the device running thru a cycle where you can see everything happening:
21:47:58 APP: Button1 multi-press 1 (This is the RF signal being detected)
21:47:59 SRC: Button
21:47:59 MQT: bhall_socket/stat/RESULT = {"POWER1":"ON"}
21:47:59 MQT: bhall_socket/stat/POWER1 = ON (retained)
21:47:59 RUL: POWER1#STATE=1 performs "power2 on"
21:47:59 SRC: Rule
21:47:59 RSL: Group 0, Index 2, Command POWER, Data on
21:47:59 MQT: bhall_socket/stat/RESULT = {"POWER2":"ON"}
21:47:59 MQT: bhall_socket/stat/POWER2 = ON (retained)
21:47:59 RUL: POWER1#STATE=1 performs "ruletimer4 5"
21:47:59 SRC: Rule
21:47:59 RSL: Group 0, Index 4, Command RULETIMER, Data 5
21:47:59 MQT: bhall_socket/stat/RESULT = {"T1":0,"T2":0,"T3":0,"T4":5,"T5":0,"T6":0,"T7":0,"T8":0}
21:47:59 RUL: POWER2#STATE=1 performs "ruletimer5 300"
21:47:59 SRC: Rule
21:47:59 RSL: Group 0, Index 5, Command RULETIMER, Data 300
21:48:00 MQT: bhall_socket/stat/RESULT = {"T1":0,"T2":0,"T3":0,"T4":4,"T5":300,"T6":0,"T7":0,"T8":0}
21:48:00 CFG: Saved to flash at F4, Count 305, Bytes 3584
21:48:05 RUL: RULES#TIMER=4 performs "power1 off"
21:48:05 SRC: Rule
21:48:05 RSL: Group 0, Index 1, Command POWER, Data off
21:48:05 MQT: bhall_socket/stat/RESULT = {"POWER1":"OFF"}
21:48:05 MQT: bhall_socket/stat/POWER1 = OFF (retained)
21:48:05 CFG: Saved to flash at FB, Count 306, Bytes 3584
21:50:01 MQT: bhall_socket/tele/STATE = {"Time":"2019-06-21:53:00 RUL: RULES#TIMER=5 performs "power2 off"
21:53:00 SRC: Rule
21:53:00 RSL: Group 0, Index 2, Command POWER, Data off
21:53:00 MQT: bhall_socket/stat/RESULT = {"POWER2":"OFF"}
21:53:00 MQT: bhall_socket/stat/POWER2 = OFF (retained)
21:53:00 CFG: Saved to flash at FA, Count 307, Bytes 3584
One of my installations of this is a porch where daylight affects the need for light. My HA already has a sensor for dark that I like taking into account cloud cover and time of day. I got this from another user a while ago, so thank you if you originally wrote this, but I am putting it to use here.
Here is the binary sensor I use for dark:
#####################################################
# Weather #
#####################################################
- platform: template
sensors:
dark_outside:
friendly_name: 'Is it Dark outside'
value_template: >-
{% if is_state('input_boolean.sunset_offset.state', 'on') %}
true
{% elif (states.sun.sun.attributes.elevation | int < 2) %}
true
{% elif ( (states.sun.sun.attributes.elevation | int < 3.5) and (states.sensor.dark_sky_cloud_coverage.state | int > 85)) %}
true
{% elif ( (states.sun.sun.attributes.elevation | int < 5.5) and (states.sensor.dark_sky_cloud_coverage.state | int > 90)) %}
true
{% elif (states.sensor.dark_sky_cloud_coverage.state | int > 95) %}
true
{% else %}
false
{% endif %}
Here is the automation I use to push that binary sensor out thru MQTT to my Slampher:
####################################################
# Dark out? #
####################################################
- id: mqtt_dark_switch
initial_state: 'on'
alias: MQTT Dark Switch
trigger:
- platform: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.dark_outside
action:
- service: mqtt.publish
data_template:
topic: "bp_socket/cmnd/EVENT"
payload: >-
{% if trigger.to_state.state == 'on' %}
'DARK'
{% else %}
'DAY'
{% endif %}
Then I add 1 additional rule to the slampher that looks for the event and acts on the information:
rule3 on event#DARK do rule1 1 endon on event#DAY do rule1 0 endon
This rule looks for the event topic DARK to come to the slampher and when it does it turns on rule1 enabling the light to function. Then when the code DAY comes thru, it disables rule 1 so the light cannot turn on at all from the RF. Tasmota has an internal sunrise/sunset thing but I did not like the timing of that and wanted to use the same as the rest of my network.
To go along with this, I added another service to my HA reset automation that makes sure my Tasmota stuff reports back with it’s current state on HA boot. I added this to default the dark sensor to dark to default the light to work if it doesn’t know the state. Seemed like the way to go here:
####################################################
# MQTT Restart Tasmota #
####################################################
#### Use this automation to get all your devices in sync, including
#### power state, immediately after Home Assistant is (re)started.
#### Also taking this opportunity to start other things up for a clean restart.
- id: tasmota_restart
alias: Power state on HA start-up
initial_state: 'on'
trigger:
platform: homeassistant
event: start
action:
- service: mqtt.publish
data:
topic: sonoffs/cmnd/state
payload: ''
- service: mqtt.publish
data:
topic: bp_socket/cmnd/EVENT
payload: 'DARK'
Notice in all this that I prefer my Tasmota MQTT Topics flipped as this way it makes more sense to me. You may need to adjust that if you run yours differently.
I am waiting for more hardware, but one on my installations of this involves a staircase into the basement with a landing where there are 2 slamphers and 2 pir’s, and I’ll have both rules turning when either PIR is triggered. I’ll add to this when I get my Bang Good order.
Thanks for reading, I hope this has helped someone!