Multi-scene buttons are not new, especially Zigbee.I have one or two from Aqara but this new button has a couple of features worth noting.It runs on a CR2477 battery and has four actual buttons in the one round removable button, which simply magnetically mounts to the supplied standard wall switch plate.
In the past, I’ve used sensors and buttons by Sonoff and others which are a pain in the bum to remove the battery.They have a coin slot to take a coin to turn the base to remove it to get to the battery.The orb has the same, but this time they’ve had the sense to put a little bump in the base, so you simply turn the button around in the base to remove the back.
I like it already.You get a comprehensive manual, two standard mounting bolts for switch panels and an adhesive foam strip to put on the back to fasten the unit to the wall, so you don’t need any holes in the wall at all, if you don’t want to do that.This is so new that right now I don’t actually have the price.
I just hope it’s reasonably priced.Sonoff stuff normally is, as long as it works without using the eWLink app.I’ll be happy if I can use it with ZigBee2MQTT.
Indeed there is a mode button inside, which I believe does just that.The default is just Zigbee.So I’m now going to go and try looking up this device in my Zigbee2MQTT.
You could be forgiven for thinking is Peter being a bit premature? This is a brand-new device! Well, let’s see.I’ll look in Zigbee2MQTT and hit the join button and see what happens.Nothing as I forgot to pull out the travel insulation strip.
Try again… Apparently inside is a Sonoff ZB-01M – and it is already fully supported!! WELL that was easy – I tried pressing each button one at a time – Zigbee2MQTT reported “button 1 single” etc.The I tried double-press – “Button 1 double” – and finally holding the button in..“Button 1 long” etc.
That’s it – a nice 4-button-in-one Zigbee wall mount switch.Not as slim as the Aqara equivalent again with up to 4 buttons – but then the Aqara version has rectangular buttons.This is certainly not a criticism of Sonoff, but the only problem with wall-mounted buttons that are not powered is they can’t have a dim light in the background which goes off when you press, because obviously that would consume too much power.
But other than that, great! You could of course choose to use these with the Sonoff APP but you’d need a Zigbee hub – if you already have Home Assistant then you probably already have a Zigbee dongle or Ethernet Zigbee device – and thankfully it is my experience that Sonoff products are always supported in Zigbee2MQTT.As usual, only time will tell if this is any good in terms of battery life, but that is quite a substantial battery they have put in there, which probably accounts for some of the height.I’ll stick it up on a wall somewhere in our new home at the end of the year, and leave it running.
No doubt, I’ll update this blog in a year or so’s time.Just for reference I checked in Home Assistant to see if the device had magically appeared… yes.And as for it’s “entities”… I’m sure that’ll all become obvious in the course of time – I did see “Stepmode.Down”, “Stepmode.up” etc.
One last thing before I go – the output states in Zigbee2MQTT were not entirely consistent..but I’d imagine any time now an update will be coming through automatically….
