I’m a little paranoid - right now I have my light switches hooked up to a homematic-actor that tells homegear when it’s being pressed so that one can switch my Tradfri/Hue lights on or off. The downside to that is that if my server is not running those lightswitches dont work. There is alexa, sure, but it’s a bit of a non-wife-friendly solution.
Do any of you know of a more independent solution that wouldn’t require a base, server or hub? I searched left and right but couldn’t find anything.
The Busch-Jaeger inserts can coordinate a ZigBee network. You can also pair HUE lights with them. It’s a bit limited though, as you can only switch on/off but not dimm lights in the network.
DISCLAIMER: I haven’t tried this though, as I’m using my relay/dimmer inserts with the ZigBee binding.
There is no real “coordinating” of a network as such…
I’m not sure why you would do this? You’d be better off using the ZigBee binding so there is some control over the network. A coordinator is just the same as a router, but has a few extra features to allow devices to join (ie the Trust Centre) - if you put the TC in a device like that, I’m not really sure how you would (for example) add install codes if needed (as is becoming required for ZB3.0).
My hue devices are paired in such a way that my hue remote can switch on and off even if deconz and/or openHAB not running. The same is true for my tradfri.
To do this you must bind the remotes to the Bulbs. Tradfri does this natively if you use the tradfri bridge. I believe the hue remote and hue bulbs do this also. To do this without matching the suppliers to build you must have some other type of zigbee solution. I know a conbee with deconz works as this is what I use.
The only thing that let’s me switch my lights with it is homegear, as every other solution I tried introduces so much lag that I wait almost two seconds from click to light. It’s even worse when I try to do any sort of dimming, as that just spams the log so fast that the Pi can’t keep up and more often than not just lags out.
The point of having a physical switch (or I guess in this scenario: a button) is that I can directly control the light - without the need of a hub. Openhab/Homegear can be so unstable sometimes that I already lost my configuration a bunch of times and had to spend days just to re-learn the homematic-devices - I had to disassemble the wall-switches every time doing that.
Thus me wanting to have a more reliable solution for the switches. The Friends of Hue-switches are incredibly expensive, but they’re battery-less. That’s kind of nice.
Yeah, I got that too. Think is - it’s still not very “ideal” as you’d have to find that remote in the dark. The idea is to be able to rely on those switches entirely, even if the hubs fail.
Sure - I got that from your previous post, but my point is you can use the ZigBee binding to run your network. This can perform all the Trust Centre functions, and if it is offline, then your network will still work just fine - you just won’t be able to join more devices.
You then need to configure devices to communicate directly between eachother rather than to send evertything to openHAB. Then your system does not rely on anything more than the lights and switches.
If you use one of the switches as the coordinator, you will not gain anything, but you will limit what you can do.
Wait, did I understand you correctly? Using the ZigBee binding I can directly connect switches and lights so they can interact with each other w/o the need of having Openhab running?
Using ZigBee you can directly connect switches and lights - the same as was suggested by @weakfl above. My point is that it doesn’t require the coordinator to be in one of these lights - if can be anywhere (including the dongle attached to OH).
Currently the OH binding doesn’t have a UI to perform these links between lights and switches - OH’s UIs are problematic, but it would be quite easy to do this through a CLI in the console so I could add this (I think there is another issue open for this.
I wouldn’t mind the CLI that much - thing is that you’d need ZigBee switches at that point. There don’t seem to be a whole lot of those around at this point. Do you know of a sender like the homematic-one I posted only for ZigBee? In theory that’d solve that.
The linking you wrote about - if I got you corretly that’s not really functionality that’s within the scope of OpenHab right now. Do you know of alternatives for that kind of thing?
Here it gets a little muddy as I would lose the ability to also control those lights with the Hue-App (which I kind of want to still do). I think exactly the thing I would want doesn’t exist, at least currently. I might still have the most versatile solution by running the logic via OpenHab (or Homegear, in this case).
I’ll definitely look into Ubisys though - you’re right, they’re hella expensive! But they are basically exactly what I’d want them to be. I’ll mark your answer as the solution because basically it is.
