I am looking for a wall switch (preferably from the company „gira“) that is Zigbee capable. However, all I have found are switches, that work as Zigbee senders. What I want is a combination of two things in my wall switch:
It acts as a zigbee actuator, which receives signals from a zigbee controller and switches the wall switch when a corresponding signal is received.
It works as a regular wall switch. This means it needs to be able to connect the electric circuit it is physically attached to when the button on it is pressed.
I actually do NOT want the switch to send a switching signal when its button is pressed. (This is what I was able to find as a product.) I just need a classic wall switch that can be controlled via a zigbee signal.
The cherry on the cake would be to have / make it compatible with a regular gira wall switch. In the best case all gira switch frames on the walls can remain as they are and I can just extend them in a way with a new module, that implements the sketched functions.
To my question:
What am I looking for? Is there something like this on the market? If so, what is it called? If there is nothing like that, why is that?
It feels like I was using the wrong terms when searching. But maybe I am wrong.
Am I correct in thinking that you want everything that a typical smart switch has, but you don’t want it to send state changes/updates to openHAB? So It only has one-way communication from the server to the switch?
If this is the case, then I have two questions:
Why don’t you want the state changes to be sent? If you have a one-way switch that can only receive commands, then openHAB will never know whether the switch is on or off. You’re sending commands to a black hole, similar to an IR remote control, and the only way to know for sure is to visually confirm whether the lights are on or off.
Why does it matter if the switch sends state updates? You need the state channel to be linked to an item so that you can send commands, but you don’t have to use the state changes to trigger rules. Just ignore them.
I can’t imagine that you’ll find a Zigbee switch that doesn’t report its state, since most scenarios would benefit from two-way communication. Can you describe your scenario in more detail? I think context might help me understand this better.
I’m afraid my text was a little misleading. I have no problem if the switch reports its state. But I need the switch to be able to work as a regular wall switch (breake the circuit and close it on button press). However, this task needs to be done on both the button press and a zigbee switch signal received. I just wanted to stress that I am not looking for a switch that sends zigbee switching signals to other devices, but rather receives them and reacts appropriately.
I have found zigbee actuators to be mounted behind a wall, but then it has no buttons. Instead it relies on a separate classic wall switch to attached electrically. I want both integrated in a single device if possible or at least two devices I can place together in the hole where my classic wall switch is in today. The idea is basically to add zigbee actuator capabilities to a classic wall switch. Do you have any ideas?
Here I’m using zigbee actuators and push buttons that looks and feels mostly like traditional switches except there is no way to tell the state by visual looking at the switch. You can see the white actuator in the left.
I cannot quite tell what I am seeing in the two images. It seems the two show different combinations of switches / actuators. Is that the case?
Looking at the top image, I understand the left mounting box just contains the actuator. This I assume receives a zigbee switching signal from a source and then closes or breaks the circuit to switch the lights on or off. Correct? If so, what do the buttons on it do?
The right mounting box then just contains a regular wall switch without zigbee capabilities? Is it related to the left mounting box in some way, or is it independent from it?
Below is a picture of the actuator, in my case is a 2 channel dimmer. S1 and S2 terminals are for connecting 2 push buttons. So you can open the lights by sending a wireless signal or by pressing the switch. Also if you use the switch the module also sends the signal to whatever zigbee gateway you are using.
