Scenic sells these: Friends of Hue Switch – Senic
Functionally they are great.
- They don’t need power as they generate that by being pressed.
- They offer 4 buttons that can be both long and short pressed.
- Various brands offer installation materials, so they neatly fit in with your Gira or Busch-Jaeger or a few other
Technically though… they have challenges. The most important one is that they don’t do proper Zigbee. As a result, you can only really pair them with your HUE and not with something like our beloved Homey. When accessing them in Homey through the connection with a HUE hub all they transferred was the “button pressed”. So you could use them to bind actions to but you can’t use the long press to dim up or down..
Enter Matter
At least that was the case until the Hue Hub allowed for Matter connections. With a Matter connection between the Homey and the Hue Hub the buttons now
- Trigger immediately (no more web polling delay)
- Offer a “Button pressed” event when a button is pressed and when it is released
This might seem super annoying because pressing the button will fire the event twice buuuut when you use the time between up and down you can determine if it was a single press (<1 sec)
or it is a long press so you can dim
In the flow below you can see that when it detects the “button pressed” event it checks to see if a loop is running.
- If the button is pressed and nothing is running:
– it sets a counter to -2
– triggers a loop every half a second (500 mili seconds). - when the loop iterates
– it ups the counter
– if the counter is > 0 it has been running for more than a second and thus Dims the lights up - If the button is pressed and the loop is running:
(well that means the button is back to it’s original position)
–if the counter (dim up strandkamer in the example) is not greater than 0 it means the button was only down briefly and we can change the scene instead
I’m sharing this because for me this has made those buttons suddenly useful in Homey.
A saw a few questions on them in the forum so I figured I make this quick tutorial.
Hope it helps someone
