Hi, is there any remote that supports button press as well as release events?
I got a Tradfri E1743 on/off switch that could support “press” and “long press” events and also some other spare Tradfri remote (the round one) with multiple buttons. But because there’s no release event a “relative dim +/- n%” for a light bulb only works when pressing the button (actually it’s a “was pressed” event, so the action starts afterwards). No matter if a use long or normal press, this will allow only e.g. +/-10% per push.
If was hoping to find a way to use some other Tradfri (or other brand) remotes and configure them as what my Hue dimmer remote and Hue smart button (on long press it dim cycles up/down) can do, i.e. continuous dim up/down. Then I probably wouldn’t need my bulbs at my Hue gateway anylonger and could do everything by Homey. But currently dimming only seems to work nicely using the Hue remotes with lamps connected to the Hue gateway.
Also all forum posts imply that one needs a remote that supports press & release events. To start a flow which increases the brightness, step by step with some delay until the release event stops the flow again.
But where to find those remotes or which apps support that as I also saw a post in the forum that the event support is often just a matter of the app, not the remotes. Which seems reasonable given that smooth button-held dimming generally works for Tradfri remotes when directly connected with a bulb.
Am I missing something in how to configure flows? Continuous dimming and the need for button release events seems to be an too obvious usecase not yet being implemented by some app or remote? Any ideas?
That’s correct, the E1743 can also be used for continuous dimming (for example, with zigbee2mqtt, long-pressing the on/off button emits a brightness_move_{up,down} event, and letting go of the button emits a brightness_stop event).
So it’s the IKEA app for Homey that doesn’t implement these types of events, but on the other hand, Homey’s flow system also wouldn’t work very well even if these events were supported: Homey doesn’t, at least out of the box, support an action that will increase the brightness of a lamp with X amount every Y timeperiod, until it gets stopped (by presumably a flow that gets triggered by a brightness_stop event).
Ideally, you wouldn’t even want Homey to be an intermediary during dimming. Instead, you want to bind the remote to the light(-group) directly, but that’s also something that Homey doesn’t support.
Continuous dimming with Homey is possible with remote controls that periodically send a signal again and again when the button is pressed and held down, and if the lamps are able to dim over a period of time (see flow: during 1 sec).
A remote control that can do this is the Philips Hue Dimmer Switch. I have only the Dimmer Switch Gen. 2 in use, so I don’t know if this is also possible with Gen. 3.
The flow looks like this:
When…
– Dimm buttons Dim-up hold (or Dim-down hold) Then…
– Set relative dim-level 10% during 1 sec
The dimming quality is maybe not quite as good as with the Philips Hue Bridge, but it’s definitely a good solution.
I thought only the release event would be missing. Currently I have all my bulbs still attached to by Hue bridge and the Homey Hue app supports a “set relative dim level” for all bulbs so I could set each bulb to decrease/increase between -100% and +100%, so e.g. in -10% or +10% steps, 10 times would be fine. With some delay in the flow that should do the trick, but without an event to stop the dim up or down it won’t help as it would always go to max. or min. brightness as soon as started.
Probably I’ll try that with a Hue dimmer just to check if that makes a difference. Yet I had it’s still directly attached to the Hue bridge, because the combo of a Hue bulp with a Hue dimmer just worked out-of-the-box. I was more interested in using some spare Tradfri remotes or other “cheap” remotes to work in a similar way for dimming… What a pity that those apps don’t support all events yet.
