Hi,
Before smart homes were a thing I bought a pack of RF plug-in wall socket switches which came with a handheld 4-way controller from my local hardware store. I have used these to control floor and table lamps in my lounge by plugging the RF switch into the wall and the cord from the light into the switch. I’m now looking to upgrade to a HA compatible equivalent setup for which I can find many switches, but can’t find any sensible handheld controllers. I’ve included photos of the two controllers I have to show what I’m trying to replace.
And yes, before you ask, I do use the R-pi energenie breakout board to control the lights through HA, but as the handheld switch talks directly to the sockets there’s no feedback loop to enable full automation.
Any suggestions for HA compatible multi-switches are welcome.
You can use many of them and you are free to program the buttons ‘as you like’
You can pair the individual buttons directly to other RF433 devices (without intervention of HA), or pass the buttons on to HA and let HA decide what to do with it…
PS You’de need a sonoff bridge (which I flashed with Tasmota) as well, but you can use it for any other 433Mhz device.
A phone with companion app?
Some newer phones can have Google Assistant/Alexa listening all the time so that you can just speak out what you want done.
Not real hardware. But in my opinion far better than 443 remotes.
Another option is esp home with a IR or RF receiver acting as the middle man and passing the signal to HA and then you can use any kind of light/switch/socket using pretty much any protocol.
It won’t cost you much to install a few of those around the house and you can use any IR/RF remote you find in a dumpster
Also I seem to hear more and more about both Sonoff and 433Mhz devices as I delve deeper into HA, so maybe it’s time to take that plunge as it’ll likely enable other automations down the line.
It’s a good suggestion for others, but personally I don’t like the phone setup. It’s silly little user interface things like having to charge it regularly, having to wake up the phone and/or unlock the the screen to use it, not being tactile and worst of all - a house with young children just play with phones!
The RF receiver however is a great idea! I’d be able to keep the wife-approved controllers but sort of upgrade them to work with HA. Will defo investigate this option further. Thanks.
SO far I use my Sonoff RF Bridge for:
2 x motion detectors
5 x RF433 switches
1 x 8ch remote (7 buttons passed on to HA, 1 controlling RF power switch directly)
Actually those RF switches where a mistake, as I purchased the wrong type; these are dumb and can only toggle, but not switch on or off, so not much use in HA (but I can still toggle it from HA using channel 1 (out of 16) on the Sonof Bridge…)
I’ll probably find some use for them eventually
I actually believe the IR version will be better and more versatile.
If you get a ESP8266 and a YS-IRTM for “each room” then you can have one (or two) remote do different things in different rooms with the same buttons since the IR will not (less likely) to interfere between rooms.
RF on the other hand will be more limited since it can go through walls.
You can have the power button to always power off everything in the room because you assign the receivers with the “code” that it should trigger, not the actual IR code.
And IR remotes are far cheaper and more readily available on the second hand market and generally have more buttons than RF remotes.
The chip I mentioned YS-IRTM actually is very good at receiving, you don’t need to aim at it and my impression is that it works in a fairly long distance.
The only drawback is that I have not figured out how to use the transmitter on the board yet.
