The Philips Hue Tap Dial is a pretty decent little Zigbee controller with a rotating dial and four buttons. I just started playing with it and have a rudimentary Blueprint working in Home Assistant.
The Blueprint works specifically with Zigbee2MQTT and Mosquito Broker but could probably be modified to work with ZHA or deCONZ (though I don’t use either of those so you’d need to do the work).
If you have a Z2M setup and are interested in playing with my blueprint, let me know and I’ll share it. Getting Mosquito Broker and Z2M set up takes a bit of work but the blueprint makes it very easy to configure this controller to automate a Roon zone (any media player, actually) once you have the basics set up.
Thanks for sharing this. I have a similar setup, Z2M mixed with official Hue integration, works great and indeed this is a very nice device. Sadly the volume up/down is not amazing but definitely works.
I personally also have old school nfc tags here and there in my house to trigger different playlists on Roon via HA, always great to have options
Are you using one of the existing blueprints? What’s the issue you have with volume?
The approach I’m taking is a bit different. I don’t call the existing “volume up” and “volume down” services. I read and then increment or decrement the current volume. This dial generates step, slow, and fast messages for rotation in each direction. My blueprint allows you to set the increment for each. You might set step to 1, slow to 3, fast to 5 for example.
For buttons, 1 is play/pause, 3 is prev track, 4 is next track. Those are all short press and release. You can customize short press of 2, and customize long press of everything.
I’m not super proud of these labels (might try to do something better), but…
If you’re interested in this, I should be able to share it soon but it’ll be in a form that requires you to use something like the File Editor add on to get it installed.
Hey, @neko…You interested in testing this Blueprint? You mentioned that the volume up/down control isn’t working well for you. I’d be interested in whether or not what I did is an improvement.
My blueprint is aware that the dial generates step, slow, and fast rotation messages. It allows you to set how many volume increments you want to move for each.
This blueprint is now up on Blueprint Exchange and should be a single-click install.
I’ll say a bit about how to get started but, before I do that, it’s worth asking if you’ve see the discussions about rooDial in this forum. If you just want a volume dial with minimal controls, rooDial is easier to set up and requires much less tinkering. If you want to spend time playing with home automation and approach it from the hobbyist perspective, then Home Assistant might be interesting. For rooDial, you can search this forum. For Home Assistant, you need:
a Home Assistant instance
A Zigbee antenna of one form or another
An MQTT broker running (e.g., Mosquito Broker as a Home Assistant add on)
Zigbee2MQTT to bridge Zigbee to your MQTT broker
Some people use alternatives to Zigbee2MQTT to bridge Zigbee to MQTT (e.g., ZHA or DeConz). My Blueprint doesn’t work for those approaches but could be modified. There are other blueprints which might, but I don’t think they do some of what mine does.
You can read about how to get started with Home Assistant here: https://www.home-assistant.io. You can build around a Raspberry Pi or buy one of their ready to go Yellow or Green boxes. Multiple options for antennas, too.
In case anyone’s interested in this little project of mine…
These Philips Hue Tap Dials have turned out to be fantastic little Roon controllers. They’re great on table tops but they also work really well as volume controllers when held in hand. They fit in your palm and you can rotate the out ring with your thumb.
I realize it might not be obvious from the pictures that the outer ring rotates.
I bought a Cricut machine to play with creating vinyl stickers for these controllers.
Still working to fully dial this in but this is a pretty good start. A couple of versions - one on a black controller, one on a white controller.
