Hello,
I have a kitchen light that can be controlled by two switches, using either to turn it off or on. I have been slowly changing things over to be a smart home but this is the first switch I am attempting to install.
I am in a double wide modular home (mobile) that was built in 1994.
At first I thought I would need a 3 way switch but when taking the normal switches apart I realized that was incorrect because the wiring on my switches are different than anything I could find online.
For one a 3 way smart switch requires 5 wires and there are only 2 wires going into the primary switch with 3 wires going into the secondary switch from the primary switch (at least I think the 3 wires connect the two switches together). Images will be attached of the wiring.
There are two wires (one black and one white) going into the first switch and 3 wires (black, white, and red) going out of that and into the second switch (I assume). The odd thing is the red wire going to the second switch is connected to the white wire going into the first switch and the white wire going into the second switch seems to be a bridge wire or a traveler wire. Not exactly sure. You will see what I mean in the images.
I need to know what kind of smart switch I can use in this set up with one remaining a normal switch.
Note that for some reason the images got switched around when uploading them. The image with 2 wires on one side and 3 on the other is what I think is the primary and the image with just 3 wires is the secondary.
M
Madmaxneo
@Madmaxneo
I don't know if you guys are into dashboards, but I am.
For a second home I tried the Shelly Wall Display 2, and while not so big, it worked well over the summer.
Since we're remodeling our house, I just swapped my old Fire Tablet (with its own problems) with two new Shelly Wall Display XL. I just removed the standard firmware, and I added mine (https://github.com/dbochicchio/ShellyElevate), forked from https://github.com/RapierXbox/ShellyElevate
I just managed to support buttons (this thing has 4 of them) and it's all auto-discovered by Home Assistant and accessible via Reactor.
I also have a new build in the works with support for buttons inside HA.
I added a bonus Javascript interface sending events (screen/screensaver status, buttons, motion) to automatically drive the dashboard (all doing in HTML+Javascript and monitoring Reactor's variable).
This specifical thing excluded, go get one of them, the device has a decent CPU for HA dashboards and blends wonderfully in the decor.
Hello all.. been a minute! I recently rebuilt my Z wave network and migrated to a new z wave stick. In order to prevent any downtime I kept my original z wave network up and ran a docker version of Z Wave JS UI with my new controller. This way I could add device by device without having any devices down.
I finally moved all the devices over to my new stick today. The final step was to migrate everything from my Docker instance of Z Wave JS UI to the HA add-on of Z Wave JS UI. However during this migration some of the names didn't populate correctly which I later managed to import back into Z Wave JS UI. The issue was in Reactor it is stuck on the default names and the entities are not updating. I removed the controller from Reactor, restarted, hard refreshed, and added the controller back however the new entity names have not updated. Also it seems like the old entities from my previous instance of Z Wave JS UI are lingering and not being marked as dead (I believe a certain amount of time needs to lapse before they're marked as dead in Reactor).
My goal is to basically purge all the entities for the 'ZWaveJS' controller in Reactor so it can pull all the updated entity names and only the entities that exist in Z Wave JS UI. I cannot find a quick way to do this, I know entities can be deleted one by one, but with over 100 entities this would take long
I am guessing that if I added the controller with a new name in in the Reactor config it would pull the updated entities and names but I think that would break my rules since the entity IDs would change (I made sure to name all the entities the exact same as they were previously to prevent this issue).
I'm slowly migrating all my stuff to MQTT under MSR, so I have a central place to integrate everything (and, in a not-so-distant future, to remove virtual devices from my Vera and leave it running zwave only).
Anyway, here's my reactor-mqtt-contrib package:
https://github.com/dbochicchio/reactor-mqtt-contrib
Simply download yaml files (everything or just the ones you need) and you're good to go.
I have mapped my most useful devices, but I'll add others soon. Feel free to ask for specific templates, since I've worked a lot in the last weeks to understand and operate them.
The templates are supporting both init and query, so you have always up-to-date devices at startup, and the ability to poll them. Online status is supported as well, so you can get disconnected devices with a simple expression.
Many-many thanks to @toggledbits for its dedication, support, and patience with me and my requests
I don't know if I'm the only one, but managing more than one Reactor installs, the need to have some sort of copy&paste for rules has grown on me.
While I understand the technical challenges, I'm wondering if a "god mode" where I could copy the raw JSON rule and paste it into another rule could be an advanced, flag only feature that could benefit power users.
I know I can copy the JSON file and proceed, but I must stop Reactor and when doing maintenance, it's more clicks to do.
Just an idea
I’ve added a couple of Shelly Wave i4 as scene controllers and I’m planning to add more, since I can just use standard buttons instead of battery-powered scene controllers, which also looks better aesthetically.
That said, I’m struggling to figure out how to write a simple rule that cycles between states every time I press a button.
Example: Light 1 ON → OFF, then Light 2 ON → OFF.
The part I can’t get right is handling the case where Light 1 or Light 2 might already be ON independently of the rule.
Maybe it’s just too much sun and relaxation clouding my brain, but any hint would be appreciated.
Use case:
When performing home maintenance, such as air conditioning, I want all rules involving air conditioning to be disabled.
To do this, to day, I have a virtual switch that I placed within all rules involving air conditioning, meaning that if I turn it off, none of them work.
Then another situation: the water pump system and garden irrigation, another switch.
In short, I had to create several virtual switches in Hubitat to disable rules in MSR.
Unfortunately, however, I was unable to cover all scenarios, so I wondered if it would be possible for MSR to support a virtual MSR switch, which, when configured in the reactor settings, would function as a general on/off switch for MSR.
If it is configured and turned off, the entire rules and actions in MSR stops working, except for the status change reading process, specifically for this switch, which, when turned on, would restart the MSR.
Would it be possible to do something like this? Any recommendations from the experts?
Probably a really dumb question.
Currently I am using the owntracks_sensor for tracking phones being in region in MSR and it works great.
Digging around with Home Assistant and toying with some dashboards, is there any way of exposing that sensor to HA trivially? I could set MSR to trip a virtual switch in OpenLuup which can then be exposed to HA (with all my other Vera devices) but that feels a bit in-elegant if I can do it directly.
Any thoughts?
Apologies if the ask is not clear/
TIA
C
...is back....
https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/08/researchers-use-calendar-events-to-hack-gemini-control-smart-home-gadgets/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=dhfacebook&utm_content=null&fbclid=IwY2xjawMBq-pleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHlSqIalzbz1IxcJFzlw8GBE6nC3FwvxcHgR370nJhogU6JjqbmRxG-lysqgh_aem_lx9XboYFKw9tpHnedGQKUA
C
As there are statements about compatibility for home assistant versions in MSR new version announcements (e.g. "HassController: Bless Hass to 2025.7.3"), I thought it would be good idea to track other controllers as well.
As an example, I can confirm that build "latest-25208-c53e8513" works with Hubitat Elevation C-8 platform version 2.4.2.134 using Maker API.
Updates: (the latest versions first in the list)
OK: build "latest-25264-2fbe9217" with Hubitat C-8 platform v. 2.4.3.123
Posts
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Need help in finding the right smart switch for my kitchen lights