That did it!!!
I want to say a huge thank you to @Ullizzz and @finopsfuntimes for their patience in helping me resolve this.
For anyone else having this issue, here’s what happened and how to fix it:
- Home Assistant see’s the emulated Hue bridge as a new device and tries to add it to your devices.
- If it does this, you’ll start to see the behaviour I saw, which can be intermittent at times.
- Remove the device and then in add-ons remove the Hue Bridge Emulator and restart HA.
- Reinstall the Hue Bridge Emulator and pair the switch as per the instructions here.
Huge thank you for the help here. Couldn’t have done it without you!
Two side topics:
- I cannot get the hold gesture to work. Double tap will play and pause music, but hold does nothing despite being configured in the settings.
- DO NOT HARDWIRE YOUR SONOS SPEAKERS. A huge issue I faced at first with this switch was slowness when controlling the Sonos speakers. I thought maybe wiring them in would speed it up. I have 9 sonos speaker systems at home. Despite only one being wired in, it resulted in Sonos automatically broadcasting a hidden mesh network (SonosNet) for the other speakers to join. This caused all sorts of issues on my home network from DHCP failures to wifi dropouts. Unplugging the Sonos resolved it, but the drawback I guess is that the Sonos UI on the switch is a little slower.
Violet team, if you’re reading this, a native Home Assistant integration would go a very long way.
In fact, here’s my list of asks:
- Feedback when you press a button to acknowledge it’s been pressed and which button was pressed. Either a beep, or if there’s no internal speaker, a glow/flash emanating from which button the press was registered.
- A native Home Assistant integration. It’s great that devoted and clever users have figured out a way to hack a solution, but a native option could be so much more powerful and allow for more than just scenes. e.g. open blinds to a %, see door states opened/closed, still frames from home CCTV in HA, etc.
- Custom wake screens. Maybe an image or live feed from an IP camera in HA.
- Make use of the sensors in the unit to give us the option to have it wake on walk up, like a Nest thermostat does.
- A better UI. The UI right now is not bad, it’s pretty efficient and it doesn’t look tacky. But I’d love to see some customisation or the ability to log in via a web UI to change the size of buttons, add useful bits of info, have the wake screen be the weather.
- Allow for better customisation of gestures. I don’t use my Sonos system as much as I use the lights. I’d love to walk in, double tap for the lights, triple tap for a HA routine (coffee machine!).
- Improve the Sonos integration. Add shuffle, search, etc.
- Look at a few other integrations such as Logitech Harmony, etc
- The support from Violet was great. Super responsive. Please keep this up. I’d rather pay more to deal with a good company than pay less to deal with a pain.
Overall I do actually like this switch, and have confidence it will be very prominent in other smart homes. But for it to get there sooner, and for me personally to buy one for each room with a Sonos in it the price either needs to come down significantly or the switch needs to do more.
Hope this helps someone else further down the line!