I got buttons!

For years I’ve used repurposed Amazon Dash buttons to do some things, by intercepting the ARP packes with custom code (Arduino or Perl).

I’ve been running openHAB for a couple weeks now, and am impressed with the flexibility. I picked up another dozen Dash buttons cheap from eBay, and can hook them into openHAB.

Now, tell me what I should be doing with them in openHAB. GO!

I’ve phased out all my dash buttons save for one. I got one branded from Dang (a natural foods company or something like that) so the button just says “Dang!” on it. Whenever my kids leave the basement lights on, I get to yell “Dang!” and push the button at the top of the stairs that turns out all the lights they left on or tell the kids to “go push the dang button themselves”, if I’m not near it. YMMV.

3 Likes

Maybe it’s time to get some auto-light routine set up for the basement, so the light switches itself off if there is no more motion/presence, then phase out the last dash button as well :wink: but that would rob you from yelling “Dang!” every now and then.

But coming back to Steve’s original question.

I have buttons by the bedside where the first click turns the house into “night - still up” mode, with the bedroom lights still on and the rest of the house dimmed. The next click after that is “night - sleep” mode, turning all the lights off. Next click in the morning turns lights on and bedroom shutters up.

Button in the living room for “TV watching” mode, long click for “cleaning/finding things” mode to turn all the lights a bright white.

Since I don’t have dash buttons, but other ones, I’m not sure if the dash buttons also register long clicks, double clicks, but if they do it’s really good to set up different scenes appropriate for the different rooms in the house, some also dependant on the time of day.

I originally got mine to be garage door openers but there was way too much lag from when the button was pressed until when the arp packet was received. I’ve never come up with any other use case for them, nor for the Zwave Minimotes which I got to replace them so all my Dash buttons and the Minimotes sit in a drawer.

For the most part, the home automations are driven by events instead of directly controlling them. When something cannot be automated through events, I have the wall switches and voice commands to Google Assistant. I just don’t have a use for buttons.

That being said, I still have them and will pull them out as soon as I have a use case for them. The lag on the Dash buttons in particular will always be a problem though.