I build my own smart lights to avoid this kind of bs. Thanks to ESPhome i didn’t even need to program them myself. Everything is in an offline VLan and connected to Homeassistant.
ESPhome
First time i’m hearing about it. Sounds very cool! Would you mind sharing your setup and how it works?
I’ve got a Sever running Homeassistant with the ESPHome Addon. The Lights got a custom PCB in them using a ESP32 and a 4 channel warm/cold white led strip driver. But you can also build them using of-the-shelf parts. They are mains powered without a switch, instead i wired the switches to a sensor input. This allows me to control the light either via the switch, or Homeassistant. They even got some buttons directly on them to force them on/off if my server is down. I also got a radar in there for presence detection. Basically the same as an infrared motion sensor, but it doesn’t turn the light off while im on the toilet. Thanks to using Homeassistant, I can change the color temperature and brightness of the lights depending on the time of day. It’s really nice to have some dim and warm lights in the evening before going to bed.
But ESPHome isn’t limited to some custom build stuff. Anything that uses an ESP32* chip can be flashed to run ESPHome instead of whatever it came with. I got some sonoff relays that control my shutters and an Emporia Vue 2 to measure my power usage. Depending on the device you might be able to flash it either via Wifi or you have to disassemble it to get to the programming pins. The nice thing about the ESP32 is that a vendor cannot lock the firmware. You can always flash something custom.
ESPHome isn’t limited to Homeassistant however. You can also have each device run a web-server to control it, or connect it to MQTT.
Also i should mention some alternatives:
- Tasmota: similar to ESPHome, but while ESPHome as the configuration compiled into the firmware Tasmota can be reconfigured on the fly. Not like the update process of ESPHome is slow however.
- WLED: if you only want to control some addressable RGB led strips. It does that one job way better than ESPHome.
I have been looking into this kind of thing. My impetus is wanting to connect my Android alarm clock to Home Assistant and set it to trigger my espresso machine to power on 30mins before I wake up. I saw ESPhome recommended for the smart plug. I’m sure I’ll find other uses once I set it up though, maybe even building my own light bulbs.
I use it to slowly turn the lights on 20 minutes before my alarm goes off. It’s great fun
Everything is in an offline VLan
This is the way.
I don’t need ANYONE to control my house when not in my house, and if that means I don’t get to either, then oh well.
I find it funny how people who are not working with any kind of electronics are the ones who have smart homes, smart bulbs, smart keys, smart tv’s. People who work in it have nothing connected to the internet, except their own server with a hammer next to it.
Speak for yourself my main server is explicitly firewalled from the modem
Well, many industries seem very interested in dragging us “happy with being manual people,” kicking and screaming, into all this tech crap.
Sometimes it can make sense… other times it doesn’t. Many tech entrepreneurs want to just own shit and claim they have brains and ideas when they don’t.
Remember the juicero? A wifi connected juice press using proprietary juice bags? It was a very extremely expensive overengineered piece of junk. With features that are wholly unneeded… and what is even dumber is that the juice bags can be squeezed by hand faster and more efficiently than by the machine!
Still, the ‘inventor’ got 120 million dollars in investments. The company went under a long time ago, but he probably is still sitting on a pile of cash.
I have a friend who has wireless everything, and bragged he even had a wifi coffee maker.
So when I asked him for coffee, he walked to the kitchen, grabbed a cup, but it under the coffee maker, walked back, fidgeted with his phone while showing me how cool it was, walked to the coffee maker, got the cup, came back and handed it to me.
He did appreciate me asking about wireless mugs.
Oh, reading your reply made me feel a bit hypercritical, LOL! While I’ve never heard of the “juicero,” I do own a “Bartesian.” It’s a cocktail-making machine, where you supply the alcohol, and the various cocktail mixers come in a Keruig-like packet. You insert the packet, select the strength of beverage you want, between non-alcoholic (who does that?) to strong, place the appropriate cocktail stemware (or Soho cup) underneath, then drink away.
I’m not too hypercritical though…it works really well, and is a party hit.
That machine you described sounds a hell of a lot more practical than the juicero. I am not a fan of keruig machines because I feel they are wasteful (but that is just me. I won’t argue that they are very convenient). But a keruig machine but for cocktails sounds like a decent idea.
I got a single-cup Keruig for a gift, but found that when it gets used by several people in short duration, condensation builds in the electronics, and shorts it out. I returned 2 of them for replacements before figuring out what was causing the problem. My daughters like to use it for tea, so I normally use an old Corningware 6-cup percolator. We use the reusable cups…While I can certainly rationalize justification for being much less of a tree-hugger for other things, I choose to be too much of a tree hugger to enjoy the full Keruig experience.
Oh I can control my stuff remotely. After connecting to my VPN that is.
There must be simpler ways than every bulb having a network interface…
Maybe, if it were up to me the entire control system would be centered in my electrical panel. But doing that after the fact is quite difficult.
Why don’t just use simple lightswitches?
Because then the lights wouldn’t change brightness or color temperature with the angle of the sun, my motion sensors wouldn’t work, and the light wouldn’t turn on together with my morning alarm.
Speaking of color temp, I shift my local environment’s hue with blues in the morning to assist with alertness, and reds at night for improved low-light vision. I do it manually with an IR remote I have conveniently velcro-taped to the wall next to the light switch. I am interested in your automated setup, I could see it being useful for tying the lights to the security cameras (motion is detected, triggers main lights to full brightness, play doberman_barking.mp3).
I explained my setup here
I see you’re a person of culture. I too get flashbanged every morning by all my lights.
My rule for smarthome stuff is that it’s self-hosted, and it has to have a low-tech way to use it. A light switch can be on Zigbee attached to my Home Assistant server, but it needs to function as just a light switch when the network is down.
Have some old stuff that doesn’t follow these rules, but I’m slowly replacing them.
All fun and games when a grey hat hacker “hacks” his way into your living room through your window and starts turning on your lights without your permission.
And someone could throw a brick through my window and take all my stuff. There are some threats that we take care of by having a society where people don’t break other peoples things just because they can.
Usually it’s due to fear of repetcussions, but now anyone in a MAGA hat can throw bricks through your window and take all your stuff whenever they want
Can I program my light bulb to recite the bill of rights, so it will play at max volume once stolen?
I recently bought a zigbee dongle to use with a home assistant VM. Do you have any advice on products? There is alot of stuff out there and I am trying to make sure I get good stuff.
My current plan is that id buy assorted types of lights to fill the roles of actual lighting and mood lighting, and I would pair that with a 4 button switch to toggle between some different presets. Been looking at Moes for the scene switch buttons and Sengled bulbs, but i feel like i am flying blind.
IKEA has a lot of cheap, yet quality stuff you can use. The best thing for me is that they are nearby, and things like switches and buttons are super cheap.
Are you using home assistant? Their website says ikea switches arnt compatible with it.
Ikea smart home stuff uses Zigbee, and just about all of their devices are supported in Home Assistant, either with ZHA or, better, zigbee2mqtt. I have dozens of buttons, bulbs and sensors from Ikea and they are very reliable most of the time.
I’m running ZHA at the moment, but some of my devices (mainly the plant humidity sensors) keep falling off the zigbee network for hours at a time. I’ve heard zigbee2mqtt resolves a lot of issues with ZHA, would that have any effect?
Hard to tell, it may have to do with your zigbee coordinator or the number of repeater devices in your network.
Which coordinator do you use?
If the network is not well meshed then the link quality could be too low for the sensors to reliably stay online. Adding repeater devices (mains powered devices like bulbs) could help here. Or if you have too many devices your coordinator may be overloaded. I had this problem for a while where I basically had to restart the coordinator because every device was offline. This happened once or twice a month. A firmware update helped here.
Generally zigbee2mqtt is superior to ZHA in my experience, but a little more work to get running. But you will find lots of documentation and YouTube tutorials on how to set it up. Not sure if it will help if your network is “weak” though.
But even if your zigbee network is great there are some devices that are just shit. I have a few analog LED controllers that randomly drop off the network and will only rejoin after cutting power to them. Doesn’t matter how good the link quality is, they go offline sometimes.
So maybe the soil humidity sensors are just not good?
Which coordinator do you use?
Connect ZBT-1
If the network is not well meshed then the link quality could be too low for the sensors to reliably stay online. Adding repeater devices (mains powered devices like bulbs) could help here.
Running six of these over three floors (2x basement, 2x main floor, 2x upstairs): https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0DQTFM1T6
Soil sensors: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DH25W72N
One is within a few feet of the coordinator. I try to just not look at the network visualization as it just causes more headaches, but I have zero “green” connections… Maybe those plugs are just garbage though, IDK.
All fun and games until you get a power outage and one of your nodes doesn’t boot properly which means no quorum to start HAOS which means no lights
But that’s what flashlights are for :p
That’s why my HAOS instance runs on bare metal 😁 (Lenovo M710q, G4560T, 4GB RAM)
Yeahh probably the smart move, I went ham acquiring some overkill hardware for relatively cheap, and now the power bill is making that evident 🫠
It has been fun playing with a setup like this, but you definitely don’t need 128gb RAM to run the measly services I’ve got, though game servers would be a blast… if I ever had time
I’m slowly converting everything to run on these little 1 liter PCs. I have three so far (four if you count the Mac Mini NAS), and an Optiplex 7050 SFF that’s been a bit hotrodded with a 300W XE3 PSU, Precision 3420 CPU cooler, & Noctua fans w/extra intake fan.
I like the Optiplex for obvious reasons, but it’s a bit of a power hog with the i7-7700 and 48GB RAM. I haven’t measured them individually, but if I had to guess, the Optiplex probably accounts for a solid 1/3 of the power usage in my entire homelab.
This is what the Unabomber was trying to warn us about!
The post the other day about charging their something with their couch and 10 yr old them…
OMG! We have meta, I’m so excited guys!
Back around 2011, I remember reading a headline along the lines of “Samsung Galaxy 2 receives Google Android Ice Cream Sandwich on Sprint” and understood it completely while also thinking that just 5 years earlier that I’d call 911 if someone said that because they were clearly having a stroke.
Charging their doorbell with their couch
I keep telling people to quit buying this shit and stop using corporate social media. But they’re scared that lemmy is a virus (shrug) and only trust daddy google and apple
!lemmysilver
!lemmysilver
!lemmysilver
I will never use smart technology. I prefer analogue technology. Imagine using a subscription in your home for lights and TV and AC and heat and appliances and then boom, they decide to terminate your subscription and now your home is inaccessible for habitat.
You already have a subscription for water, electricity and heating. Your parents had and your grandparents too.
yeah, because those are necessary for survival? like, fundamental components of a comfortable modern life? being forced to subscribe to things that used to be one-and-done purchases is ridiculous attempt to make us rent our pleasures. have fun with that
And they’re two different services that can’t be comparer… One for energy and other utilities, and the other a subscription to use software to turn on the lights lol
They are not necessary. They are convenient. You pay for convenience.
Water?
Water what?
There are ways you can set up a smart home without subscriptions, for instance using Home Assistant. But most people somehow chose to be stuck in these cloud apps with subscriptions. Ring, with a subscription for a doorbell, is wild to me.
Honestly I’m fine with smart technology. As long as I can homebrew it or something ;3
I have shitass intelligent bulbs. In case of lost connection, they work like standard bulbs via , you know, switching lights on or off via switch. Wtf. Also app allows me to connect via bluetooth and just requires me to be on the same wifi.
Cheap intelligent lightbulbs apparently are better xD
I like smart tech, as long as I can make it work for me and not just another data vacuum for some faceless corporation. I’ve got Home Assistant handling a lot of my stuff now, and I’m moving things over to it and replacing corporate-app-only things with things that can work locally.
I’m interested in doing this also. Is there a guide you’re following, or would recommend?
Home assistant has been on a push to be more user friendly. It’s gotten quite good, over the last few years. It’s not quite to mass deployment levels yet, but it’s managed to wrap all the evil parts in easy to use interfaces.
The best bet, to play with it, would be a raspberry pi. There are premade images of home assistant available to install. Stick one on as SD card, and follow the prompts. You’ll be amazed at what it can just find on your home network.
Cool, I’ll throw it on my pi4. Thanks!
Yeah I’m never buying those bulbs again. Learned that lesson years ago.
Being able to change colors from your phone is neat but let’s face it, you’re going to have it on the same setting forever anyway.
Maybe once I start selfhosting I’ll fuck with HomeAssistant but till I control what connects to what, how, and why, I’m good.
I like using the smart bulbs as part of my wake up alarm. HomeAssistant starts fading the lights on 10 minutes before my alarm is set to go off.
I bought the bulbs before Hue made accounts mandatory, so I blocked the bridge from all internet access, and it never got the update. If I ever need new/more bulbs, I’ll be just buying some generic zigbee bulbs.
If it’s just dimming you could go with dumb dimmable bulbs and just make the light switch “smart”.
Apparently modern dimmers just PWM the power so it wouldn’t take much to make something that does that. I assume LED bulbs work nicely with dimmers by now.
it very much helps to be able to set colour temperature in this scenario
In my case, I don’t want all the bulbs on, and splitting up the circuit now would involve cutting holes in my ceiling and walls. Otherwise, yeah, I would have gone with a smart switch. Most LED bulbs are dimmable these days.
The smart light switch has exactly the same problems as the smart bulb, and it’s much harder to replace.
Smart switches aren’t really a big deal to swap in. Plus, there’s more options for purely local only devices based on espHome.
The only reason I didn’t go that route is because I have wall sconces that I wanted to separate from pot lights, and I really don’t like doing drywall repairs.
But the benefit of a smart switch is that it remains “always on” for remote control, and physical actions on the switch also reflects on its state at the software level.
That said, I’d go with stuff that don’t need online connectivity.
Hue bulbs are just zigbee. You can get an offline zigbee hub, plug it into Home Assistant, and control it without needing the Hue hub anymore. Then just keep using your existing bulbs and buy generic zigbee ones as needed to replace when they fail.
I have one WiFi bulb in my house near the entrance to my office. I turn it red to let my housemates know I have a meeting without leaving my chair.
This is about the only reason I could see for a WiFi light bulb. I could wire something but that’s a lot more work.
Do you manually set the light bulb to red or do you have some kind of automation?
I tried to set up an automation with home assistant, because I use it for everything anyway.
But getting the information “You’re in a call” from microsoft is impossible, if you can’t create an “app” in order to get an api key, if the company sysadmin doesn’t want you to have it.
It is more work, but imagine how cool you would feel with a big red button on your desk that you hit to turn the light on!
Thousands of people found out during 2020!
(I’m sure there was a physical button one somewhere)
I haven’t reconnected all of my smart-bulbs in over two years because every time the software updates or when I have to change devices I have to reinstall everything all over again and find my account information and reset my password and all that, and it’s fucking absurd and I am done with it.
Fuck voice controls, it was fun at first but there are switches on the wall, I will keep using them.
Maybe in a few years some AI program will be released that actually works and can be used to assist with home-control and it will just work autonomously, but I doubt it. These companies have zero intention or motivation to produce things that make our lives better, they go halfway by making something “cool” we want to try, but don’t make efforts to make the new, cool things actually work better and more efficiently for users. No need, if they already buy the thing, then line goes up and that’s all that matters.
That was how I expected things to go when ‘smart’ bulbs came out based on all the other sMaRt stuff, but kinda expected it to improve over time for some silly reason.
We’re experiencing the same thing with AI right now, in that the companies are producing shit that promises the moon and the stars, but they’re not making actual effort to make a powerful, universal product that can actually be broadly useful. Why do that when you can just release incrementally updated models? Why make a product designed to help you do actual business and work when you can make a machine that is good at entertaining you for a few hours until you get bored? They’ve been doing this with smartphones and other tech products for years.
Hass is awesome, but not something you’d probably use instead of an actual switch, I use it for my leds in my office where it makes sense.
I’m of the mind that Home Assistant should live alongside your lights and everything. They should still function without it, but function better with it. Like my lights are all still controllable from normal light switches, but with Home Assistant they change color temperature and brightness throughout the day with the sun.
Exactly, it adds, it doesn’t replace.
So you can set the lights when you’re away, or it’s inconvenient, but you have a switch to act like a normal human otherwise.
Yeah, I want smart switches w/ manual override, not smart bulbs. I can maybe see those smart bulbs for accent lighting or something, but definitely not for the majority of the lights.
The cheap ones we got have a fallback to 50% brightness warm white, if you turn them off and on again twice within a couple of seconds. Without that I doubt I could live with them either.
Tip: don’t get the smart bulbs, get snack sockets. Easier to fix and reset and bypass if needed.
Yeah that’s probably what I’ll do if I bother.
I’m an electrician, having regular lights is fine lol ;)
?
Lmao autocorrect got me! I meant smart sockets.
I view them as a new and separate product.
The regular lights, the “big light” as my neurodivergent friends call them, are normal bulbs with electroc-mechanical dimmers. The bulbs still burn out, the dimmers still break, and sometimes the power goes out entirely in storms or for maintenance, but in general they are pretty reliable. But I need to get up and manually actuate the switch to turn it on or off.
The smart lights are luxury lights and plugged into floor or table lamps. They set the mood and the tone. I’ve never liked the modes where they change color or brightness automatically, but I do like the ability to make the house green on St. Patrick’s day, or make certain rooms red, orange, or purple for Halloween. Or sometimes just whatever mood we want to go for. Being in lamps, that makes it easy to do things like reset them or just manually turn the electricity off if they are misbehaving.
I would prefer if they were on an open-source locally-hosted software. When I first did my investigation a few years ago there were a couple of projects in their infancy so maybe I need to look again.
Matter over Thread is generally what you should look for. Local control is always possible, and it’ll work with any major ecosystem.
You do need a “Thread Border Router”, which you likely already own. If you’re tech inclined, Home Assistant is amazing, though it takes some tinkering.
Echo (4th Gen) Echo Show 8 (3rd Gen) Echo Hub Echo Studio Echo Studio (2nd Gen) Echo Plus (2nd Gen) Echo Show 10 (3rd Gen) Eero Beacon Eero Pro Eero 6 Eero 6+ Eero Pro 6 Eero Pro 6E Eero PoE 6 Eero PoE Gateway Eero Max 7 Apple TV 4K (2nd generation) Apple TV 4K Wi-Fi+Ethernet (3rd generation) HomePod (2nd generation) HomePod mini Nest Hub (2nd generation) Nest Hub Max Nest Wifi Pro Nest Wifi SmartThings Hub (v3) SmartThings Station Aeotec Smart Home Hub
Amazon…google…apple…yeah none of these routers are going in my house.
Sad how far they’ve fallen. I used to think new tech was cool. Now it’s depressing.
My concern is, those are microphones that listen if you criticize Our Great Leader.
You wont regret starting with HA. It’s awesome and the possibilities are endless.
Just to mention a few of my use cases:
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I adjust lights from my phone while seated in the sofa to get a good lighting for watching movies. Since my house has open solution between kitchen, dining table and TV corner, it’s nice to be able to reduce all lights to my preference.
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In the room I use as an office, it’s nice to have integrations with my periferals to adjust lighting to accomodate for video call meetings.
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It’s nice to go through the rooms to check which lights are off after going to bed.
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When putting my baby to bed, it’s nice to be able to dim down lights from her bedside while singing lullabies and comforting her. I can also dim lights in the hallway to reduce lights peeping through the cracks around the door and avoid lighting up the room when I leave.
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When on vacation, it’s nice to have lights which can vary a bit during the day to create the apparence of the home not being empty.
… So is this all worth it? Maybe not. Probably not. I’m pretty confident that I would be happy without any smart bulbs in my home. The inconveniences regularily outweigh the conveniences. But the conveniences do exist, and there are times when I am very happy to have them.
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I added my heated socks to Home Assistant so I can have them turn on when getting out of bed because I have a pressure pad under my mattress to track when I get up.
Frivolous automations is the way! I have a WLED strip go on 5 pm when a wheely bin needs to go out, with colour matching next day’s bin collection.
If it has to be smart, instead of every single bulb, wouldn’t you better have the light switch in smart?
A bulb is easy to replace by anyone. The switch isn’t.
Your point is?
If someone wants some “smart” lights but can’t do mains wiring they are going to buy the bulbs. Easy as that. Most people don’t know/care about the issues those bulbs have.
Ah, ok. Doing it easy vs. doing it right.
(Different commenter here) Except that not only does your solution not really add much benefit to the average consumer, but if there’s an issue like this with the switch, which would be using the same technology, then you can’t just change it unlike slapping in some regular lightbulbs temporarily. Sure for a cluster of 6 pot lights the switch would be great but for lamps(which may be sharing their plug with something else) or single ceiling fixtures it’s one or two bulbs vs. paying someone to install a [likely more expensive] smart switch to turn on one light. And this is a friend reporting on tech they don’t have themselves so it literally could be that the dude had a smart switch!
If you redirected the energy you used on being smug into being smart you may have gotten there on your own, but here we are.
The one I have in my bedroom blinks like crazy if it gets desynchronized with the cloud and that happens all the time
That would make for a good alarm mode synced to your phone. Strobe lights + screamo music is all I need for a good start to the day.
My phone lets me listen to over 10,000 different songs.
How many different songs do you listen to each week?
Oh, I just play my 15 favorites on loop.
I have over 6,00 songs on Media Monkey. I let them play at random while I’m cooking. Often I will skip one if I’m not in the mood and sometime I will delete one. Varity is the spice of life!
all 10,k at once.
Not sure, I usually listen to DJ sets on soundcloud
I have 800 downloaded songs
My music folder is 8006 files (53.7GB) but I probably only listen to maybe 200 of them that are actually in my normal playlist.
When was the last time you listened to No. 658?
Mine play at random. Actual random, not depending -on-corporate-feels-random.
Picked by random index or ordered in a random sequence? The former has some small chance of playing the same song twice in a row while the latter plays every song before repeating, so the latter is superior.
I blame Spotify for its crappy algorithm. I have over 2000 songs on my liked list and shuffle gets me the same 30 every day.
Clear your cache. That supposedly works.
I have and it does for a short while.
Don’t let ‘em
https://stevenaleong.com/tools/spotifyplaylistrandomizer
(What’s the worst that can happen, Spotify account/credit card stolen… publication of all listening data… I am paranoid, still trusted the guy and his tool for Tru-Ly Random Playlists)
…assume not True-Random Truly 😉
Thanks!
Their recommendations thing is still relatively new and developing, but I love listenbrainz recommendations. You can set it up to follow your music listens on multiple different music streaming apps (and locally too, I think). It made it easier for me to bite the bullet and cancel Spotify.
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It’s not just theirs, I swear every fuckin streaming service has made the most dogshit algorithm of all time. If I have a playlist of 100 songs, and I hit shuffle and repeat, I expect a list to be generated with each song in a random order that will get played through until each song has been played once, and then ideally a new randomized list is generated to listen to the same 100 songs again in a different order.
For every streaming service I have used so far, my experience is that it’ll just pick a cluster of maybe 10-15 songs, and cycle through exclusively that until the algorithm either decides you want to listen to something not on your playlist, or the internet connection breaks for a second and the algorithm just gives up completely on randomization.
If you don’t like it, stop using it. There’s no one to blame but yourself.
Yeah, you’re right. I pick 2000 songs and put them in a list, then tell it to shuffle all 2000 songs, and it plays the same 30 over and over again. That’s all my fault.
You keep using a service/app that you know doesn’t work the way you want it to. Do you know the definition of insanity? xD
I have 7500 songs downloaded on my phone (actually downloaded, the .opus files) and I use Poweramp to listen to them. It consumes less battery, the quality is the same or better and the shuffle option works as expected. I also don’t need to log in to anything.
It’s overcomplicated because it’s not immediately easy to keep the smart functionality totally local to your own network.
Almost every company that sells an IoT product wants you to make online accounts, download their special app, sign up for subscriptions, download useless firmware updates, and have all the hardware connect externally with their mothership cloud servers in order to function, all because they want to run a data harvesting racket disguised as an “ecosystem”.
I’d use mechanical switches in the house, but at the same time, yelling at Siri to turn on my lights for the third time is the closest thing we currently have to sexbot servants. I only have so many years left on this planet, and I wish to embrace the future now.
Home Assistant + ZigBee devices.
If only ZigBee was reliable. I had to send back a wall switch because I deactivated the default on/off in favor of hassio handled response. When it lost ZigBee connectivity I couldn’t put it in pairing mode because the on/off was deactivated and holding both wasn’t recognized.
ZigBee is reliable, your specific device might not be.