I’ve just decided to start playing with IoT and I have setup zigbee2mqtt with a few Philips hue lights, to test it out.
Now I’d like to get rid of my phone, are there any wall switches that allow you to control the color ? I’ve only been able to find on/off and dimmer for switches, some remotes seem to have color but I couldn’t mount that on the wall, it wouldn’t replace the current dumb light switch.
Basically I’m just looking for something like the RGB Genie 3 Zone remote and dimmer, but wall mounted, with physical on/off (as well as zigbee on/off).
If I understood your request correctly, then this doesn’t exist.
One possibility is that you control the light only with the wireless remote over ZigBee and just leave the dumb switch on all the time. This way if home assistant or ZigBee should fail you can still use the dumb light switch to turn on/off the light. RGB Genie 3 should be supported by ZigBee2MQTT as far as I know.
Not 100% sure on this, but if you have a smart switch which controls physical power you are probably going to have some delay, because if the hue bulb was powered off and then powered on, it needs to initialize and publish the message to MQTT afterwards, which could take some time.
I just use an Ikea round remote and have the sideways buttons linked to a scene switcher. Basically an input_select with all my colour scenes listed. Pressing the sideways buttons selects the next/previous item in the list and an automation sets the current selection.
Well leaving the switch on is what we’re doing now but that’s not great, you end up having to turn it off then on again to “force it” if it had been stopped through HA.
I’ll look for at least a switch with on/off + physical off I suppose, it’ll be better than nothing even if it doesn’t do colors. Thanks
Why do you want to turn the power off to the lights too? Are the lights you’re wanting the physical on/off switch for smart bulbs?
If so then it makes no sense to control them in that way. A zigbee switch can control all the lights. Just put a blaning plate over the existing switch and mount the zigbee controller on top of that.
Does zigbee2mqtt not allow for binding remotes with lights?
With deconz if you bind a remote with a light or group of lights (or rather if you add lights to the switch group) it still allows controlling them even if HA/Deconz is down.
Well I don’t know how you’d do that tbh, but I don’t have anything to test it out. But if you can’t turn off your light physically anymore, how do you even change the bulb ? Having to go outside and open the breaker to change a light doesn’t sound great.
I suppose something that I’d put over the original switch is a good idea, I didn’t know that existed but worse case I could always just take it off and use the good old switch under it to turn it off. Looks like some don’t even need batteries, I’ll look into that, thanks !
My bulbs are LED smart bulbs. So I either don’t need to change them or if I did they don’t get hot and I could just unscrew it while it’s still on. It’s not a problem.
In the end I think we’ll go with the light switch cover for hue dimmers, samotech seems to be selling those for cheap on amazon and it allows you to mount the hue dimmer switch over the old light switch, and worse case you can just remove it to flip the old switch.
The only issue is the kitchen/living room where we have 3 gang switch, and I was hoping to smart bulb up only two of the three areas. I could either replace the current 3 gang with a 2 gang that I’d cover with the hue dimmer thing, plus a smart switch for dumb bulbs next to it, or just a 3 gang smart switch for dumb bulbs and not use smart bulbs there, maybe only the lamps would be enough. Guess we’ll have to think about it.
I considered making my own PCB with a cc2530 on it to do what I wanted : physicall on/off + zigbee on/off but that looks a bit tough, might revisit that if I have too much time on my hands someday. I’ve found a few posts of people who seem to do these kinds of things though, maybe someone will make something like this at some point.