Ok so we’ve got a bunch of different Home Assistant-related topics dotted about the Community (I’ll link them below because some of them are really useful) but no actual Home Assistant topic. Given quite a few of us use it and sink so much time (and money) into it, I’m starting one here for more general discussion.
Some existing topics where Home Assistant has come up:
So to start the discussion, personally I’ve been running Home Assistant at home for a little while now. One of the things I’ve wanted to do was bring our old light switches back into use. I really like the idea of having some more quirky and interesting light switches around the house, but out the box they aren’t compatible with smart light bulbs since flipping the light switch kills the power and makes the bulb unreachable.
I bought a few Sonoff MINIR4Ms with the hope of fixing that so I can later change the switches. Here’s what they look like, nice and small to fit in the existing switch back box.
Wired them all up, hooked them up via Matter and got them to show up in Home Assistant.
So these have a mode where the flipping of the physical light switch sends a signal/can trigger an event, but does not change the state of the relay.
What this means is you can keep power to the bulb 100% of the time and have the switch trigger an automation in Home Assistent to turn on or off the light.
Unfortunately as with all things Home Assistant it wasn’t that straightforward. Out the box you can only see the relay state, not the physical switch events in Home Assistant. After some digging I managed to find a community integration that shows the light switch events in Home Assistant. This works ok but runs over the web and not locally - I now have automations to trigger the light after the switch is flipped, but they’re not instant. I find from switching the light to the action happening can be anywhere between 0.5 and 2s. I’m hopeful Sonoff will eventually expose the switch event over Matter, but for now this is ok.
Next up and now I’ve proved it works, I’ve got a few more complex lighting circuits to tackle. I’d also like to bring control over our bathroom extractor fans into Home Assistant to work in tandem with our radiator thermostat humidity sensors.
I’ve also bought a Sonoff Zigbee dongle so that I can start to retire my old Ikea hub. Getting that set up is today’s job.
Anyway, enough about me, is anyone here working on anything exciting?