DIY HomeKey locks via Reactor

[akbooer]

Finally, I’ve found an adequate replacement for my beloved MiniMote four-button remotes (I’ve had nine of them for the last 10 years or so!). I should have realised this earlier, but with four buttons and approximately the same form factor, the Philips Hue remotes are viable replacements…

…however, they are, of course, Zigbee and not Zwave, but this doesn’t matter in my HA environment, which has now completely ditched Zwave and Vera for all lighting and control functions, and replaced them with Hue and Shelly devices. These are all brought together with a Homebridge installation running under Docker on Synology NAS with the Apple Home app as the UI. This gives, of course, both secure remote access and voice control.

The MiniMote buttons I had configured as scene triggers to do whatever I needed, most usually toggling lights. The same functionality is easily achieved within the Home app by appropriate shortcuts.

I’m still using openLuup as a secondary hub which mimics all the various devices using MQTT and the ALTHUE plug-in and logs all device and sensor data using the built-in Historian and viewed through Grafana.

Works for me!

AK

[a-lurker]

@akbooer Interested to see that you have ditched Z-wave. My Vera does Z-wave only and I am thinking of moving that to Z-way from the Vera. But now Z-Wave JS seems to be pretty good. Not sure how the latter works but it looks like Home Assistant would be required. I've got a lot of Z-wave device inside walls and I'm paranoid the Z-wave system will collapse one day.

The Shellys devices are inexpensive and flexible but I wondering if you have any falling off your network, from time to time, being none meshed WiFi devices? The premises are pretty large here and would probably need WiFi repeaters to keep things working with Shellys. I assume you're using MQTT with these?

I'm interested in how to configure the Hue buttons to be scene triggers in openLuup. I think that I could make use of a few. However, I'm not clear on how this is configured. Any hints appreciated.

[akbooer]

Absolutely no problem with the reliability on the network with the Shellies. My biggest worry was that they would not get a good signal in a house with stone walls half a metre thick and inside metal wall boxes with metal faceplates, but they do just fine. I do have a number of WiFi routers on a wired Ethernet backbone because of the construction of the house.

I have used MQTT to link with openLuup, but if they control other Shellies, then I configure them to use HTTP also. If they control Hue devices then I do this through HomeBridge, which bridges to the Hue hub directly.

For triggering from Hue remotes, then, assuming you’re using ALTHUE, they appear as scene controllers. The trick with all these types of devices is to set a trigger on the LastSceneTime variable and then read the value of the sl_SceneActivated variable to get which button was pressed.

[a-lurker]

Good to hear that the Shelly devices are working well for you. I'm not sure I could cope with the maintenance of piles of WiFi devices. But I'm still trying to work out if I need Z-Way or Z-Wave JS.

Thanks for the hint on tracking the Hue buttons via the LastSceneVariable & sl_SceneActivated - makes sense. Hoping if you could explain the deference between triggers and watches. I always use watches with openLuup, so I've forgotten or perhaps I never knew the differences between the two in the first place. Somewhere deep back in the past I thought triggers were a no go in openLuup - clearly I've got no idea.

I see there is now the "Hue Tap Dial". I should ask AMG0 if he would be willing to integrate it. Seems you could use the ring for a volume control and the buttons to mute your TV, etc.

[akbooer]

Triggers in AltUI under openLuup are implemented as devices variable watches. The native Vera trigger route was never implemented under openLuup (because I believe that their implementation was hopelessly flawed.)

There is now, in fact, a native openLuup implementation for triggers that doesn’t depend on AltUI at all, but can be set up and displayed under AltUI, and works somewhat differently from the Vera method, but they are basically variable watches. I could supply details of how to do this, if pressed, but unless you’re planning on configuring an openLuup system which doesn’t run AltUI (which is certainly a feasible thing to do) then I wouldn’t bother.