Hi. I’m new to HA, and am looking for physical button recommendations. I got tasmota smart plugs, and those just needed HA’s mqtt add-on and tasmota integration. They work like a charm. Now I want to get a physical button (wired or battery) that I can use to toggle the smart switches. I also would like to do this in the most private way possible. I noticed that the smart plugs only connect to npt.org, which is perfect. Is there a similar option for buttons? I dont have ZigBee or Zwave products or anything, but that is an option.
I found this button and it uses ZigBee. Is this the best option.
ZigBee is the future OP. Well maybe not THE future but your future.
I’m talking from having been where you are, at the start of the journey not wanting to spend too much, buying gradually when I had a few quid handy.
I have a Zig Ah Zig Ah stick and it’s been flawless. It’s basically the same as the Sonoff ZigBee stick everyone says is great, but supplied by another company.
I use it through ZigBee2MQTT which I believe is Open Source.
So the step up is getting a ZigBee stick. Then you plug it in to your HA device (you may have to flash it with a firmware first, and also they work better on a 2m long usb wire to keep them away from your wireless bits of the computer) and install ZigBee2MQTT and configure that.
You already have MQTT so that’s already ready.
After that you can pretty much buy ANY ZigBee devices and they’ll work. Seriously. None of this Tuya hub for one thing and Sonoff hub for that, all in one.
I personally have IKEA and Aqara buttons working at the moment, one is my doorbell. They’re battery powered and work pretty much immediately as compared to the cloud based WiFi lightbulbs I started out with.
First ZigBee device I bought, to test that the stick worked, was an Aqara Cube. Have a Google, they’re really cool and totally pointless, everyone should have one.
OP, this is the way. I use the Sonoff zigbee dongle with zigbee2mqtt on a spare pi located centrally in my house and it works great, home assistant is down in the basement. I have had nothing but issues with battery powered zwave devices of many brands and all of my light switches are zwave and they work fine so it definitely wasn’t a range problem. I will probably slowly replace those with zigbee switches as they die because the zigbee mesh has just been so much more reliable.
Do make sure to throw a few mains powered zigbee devices on your mesh to act as routers once you get more than a few devices on the mesh, it also helps with range and response times.