It has taken a long time but I’m pleased to share that Philips Hue Tap Dial/Switch support is finally coming to ZHA. It will be available in the November, 2024 release which should go to production this upcoming Wednesday.
In preparation for this, I’ve created two new Home Assistant blueprints to simplify setup.
Roon users should likely use this blueprint, which is designed specifically for using this device to control a media player. It has been primarily tested with the Roon integration for Home Assistant owned by @GregD.
It offers velocity-sensitive volume control as well as default transport control behaviors. You can additionally provide custom automations for long presses as well as double, triple, and quadruple presses of all buttons.
The other blueprint I created does not assume a media player and allows you to customize all actions. You could, for example, use the dial to control a dimmable light or a window covering. Velocity-sensitive rotation events allow for full customization of how rotation events are interpreted.
That blueprint is here:
If you happen to be a Z2M user, I’ve got you covered with this blueprint:
The timing of the release is a bit off for me. I’m traveling for a couple of weeks starting Tuesday, and the release will be on Wednesday. I’ve been using these blueprints for a couple of months during pre-release so hopefully they work fine with release. If not, I’ll have to look at it when I’m back.
These controllers are a great option. Hope you enjoy yours!
Many thanks. This looks interesting. I have a home assistant installation but not yet looked into ZHA. As far as I understand I will need a USB Zigbee adapter to get started. Any recommendations for a reliable adapter?
Thanks
I was originally using a Philips Hue Bridge in Home Assistant to support my ZigBee network, but changed over to a Home Assistant SkyConnect dongle last January, when it became mandatory for the Hue Bridge to be associated with an online user account. This has worked very well for me.
The Home Assistant SkyConnect dongle has now been renamed to the Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1, as a ZWave dongle will be added to the range of Connect devices.
I now have a Sonoff usb dongle on the way and am looking forward to play around with it. Only found out about the SkyConnect dongle after ordering the Sonoff but the SkyConnect does not seem to be available at the moment anyway.
Do you have a USB extension cord? Apparently Zigbee dongles work best when not plugged directly into a USB 3.0 socket on your computer - too much wireless interference…
I was planning to plug the dongle into the RPI that is running HA, but have already seen suggestions to use an extension cord. Maybe there is one in my big bucket of cables.
Thanks for the tip.
I’m leaving today on a two week vacation and my connectivity will be limited. If things don’t go well, I’ll try to help when I can but code changes in the blueprint are likely to not happen for two weeks.
I hope you’re able to simply install the blueprint by clicking on the button in the appropriate linked post and then create the automation.
You’ll want to have ZHA set up and the Hue Tap Dial associated before you do this and you don’t need to wait for the new HA to get portion done.
Good luck and hope it all works well!!
@GregD - the work I did in these blueprint pales in comparison to the work you do on the Roon integration. You will see, though, that there’s quite a bit of attention to detail in the blueprints - collapsing sections, icons, lots of documentation. It was fun to do.
I suspect the ZBT-1 availability issue is related to this:
The Sonoff dongles have worked well for me with and without USB extension cords but it’s not a bad idea to use one, particularly if you don’t get the range you expect. Zigbee has great range and range can be easily extended by adding any device that can act as a repeater. I’m sure @Geoff_Coupe and @GregD know this. Smart plugs are the common strategy for this.
I didn’t recommend this earlier because it’s substantially more complicated than a dongle, but my Zigbee solution has been this for a few months:
This allows me to physically separate my Home Assistant instance from my Zigbee antenna. I run HA in a Docker container on a Synology NAS in a location where an antenna doesn’t work well. The Zigstar is connected to ethernet in a different room. This is not plug and play - it requires some knowledge and tinkering, but it’s been working very well.
Home Assistant 11.0 is now live and I’ve verified that the blueprints at least install correctly. I’m traveling and can’t actually test them with the final release. Hopefully it’s all good!
If you have any issues, you can turn on “Logbook” support from within the blueprint and then watch Home Assistant’s Logbook (left nav) to see what is or isn’t happening.
I had a quick go at this and the blueprint installed without a problem was was easy to configure but for some reason it does not work. In the logs I can see the following:
„ Error while executing automation automation.philips_hue_tap_dial_media_controls_ipad: UndefinedError: ‘dict object’ has no attribute ‘event’“
I wish I had time to help with this or at least a guess about what might be going on. Your automation has iPad in the name. Are you trying to control your iPad as a media zone?
For this to work with Roon, you’ll need to have the room integration installed and choose one of your media players from inside your blueprint based automation. If you haven’t done that, that could be the source of the issue.
