Like it's an absolute requirement that they show a different physical position when on or off?
I've got some relatively cheap z-wave switches. They're only momentary, but up is on and down is off. When they're off, I have them configured to show a small white light on the bottom. So my indication of switch state is "small light = off, big light in the middle of the ceiling = on".
The switches _can't_ be out of sync with their state because they are directly controlling the attached lights. If anything were to somehow get out of sync, it would be home assistant.
Mechanical switches aren't even reliable for this because of how 3-way switches work (their state doesn't indicate the state of the light). Unless you remember which are 3-way and which are single, you can't trust any of them. With smart switches in the same locations this is a non-issue.
An interesting thing is switches where you can't see if they're on as easily, such as the outside front lights, are for the most part fully automated (based on timer/door/motion and/or camera object detection) and we basically never touch the switch at all.
It's important to be consistent, though, since you technically can program the switches to do anything. In my house pressing up once turns the light on as you'd expect, but in some rooms the light will be less than 100% or have a warmer color temperature at night. Pressing twice turns on max brightness (or something similar, such as: 5000K color temp; also turning on the lights an adjacent room; turning on _all_ the backyard lights). I rarely use 3, 4 or 5-taps except for a couple special things (eg: 4x off on my office switch puts my PC to sleep; 3x on one of the basement switches activates a "party mode" my kid loves).
It is an aesthetic concern. If you have two light switches next to each other, they can get out if sync by being in different positions but representing the same state (light on or off).
That would be very ugly.
They look like a push-button, are therefore always "aligned", though the electrical switch alternates between open and closed.
Plus the momentary switches are always centered, they look fine next to traditional switches in either position.
I've lived there for over 5 years, and I still regularly press the wrong switch where there are two or three next to each other.
I have some of these:
https://www.thesmartesthouse.com/collections/800-series-z-wa...
(Third photo shows a side view.)
They can't be in different physical positions. They're momentary switches. When you press it up then release, it goes back to centered. The only indication of state on the switch is the (configurable/optional) little LED at the bottom of the switch. I have mine set so it's white if the switch is off (helps you find it in the dark), and off when the switch is on.
So if you have any 3-way switches in your house (I do!), it's actually an improvement as far as your concerns.
This sounds great. Can you provide a pointer or full search term to getting these ?
I've got a mix of the "Zooz ZEN71" for places where I need to switch larger loads (e.g., bathroom light and fan, all my outdoor lights) and the "Zooz ZEN72" elsewhere as it supports dimming.
Not easy to do, short of using switches that can be operated through servos. However you could replace the switches with buttons and step relays that feed back their state to the server, in other words the server doesn't care about the switches or buttons anymore but only reads/writes the relays state.
https://residential.lutron.com/us/en/stand-alone-controls/su...
- State A (on) - power the device and power the magnet so that the switch moves.
- State B (off) - power off the device and the magnet, a spring moves the switch.
Updating HA always reminds me of what a friend used to say. "Software is like cathedrals. First you build it, then you pray".
The post-update relief when everything actually keeps working for once is really great though.
If you can from some other location see the light switch you already know the state of the lights.
If your automations are set up well you really should hardly be touching the light switches so they become more of something you only interact with for special reasons.
For the lights that I want to "keep mechanically in sync" I replaced the switches with buttons and used a re-flashed (ESPhome) sonoff-mini which conveniently has a button input for the relay. Everything is synchronized no matter the operating interface.
That would be nice, but in all other areas in tech that's exacly the opposite of what companies want. I haven't looked into matter too much, but I'm sceptical.
If you would rather have the lights control themselves (ex: rgb lights) you can always just replace your physical switch with something similar to the TX but that's just a button and then use automations on HA to have it tell the light what to do.
HA supports HomeKit without requiring any Apple devices.
As of today, Matter is still basically junk.
I recently bought some Matter smart plugs; I wanted the matter ones to test out Matter and see if it was worth investing more into since I have a SkyConnect in dual-mode.
I paid _double_ for smart plugs with Matter support, only to find that when connected via matter they're just dumb switches; none of the advertised energy monitoring functionality works. When I asked around on the HA Discord channels about _why_, it turns out that the Matter spec doesn't yet support things like energy monitoring.
Until the spec becomes actually useful, it's just a waste of money that will give you fewer features than the device might actually support.
Personally my ideal HA would just be if YoLink made their platform open source. Their hardware is cheap and actually works pretty much perfectly, the only thing missing is open local APIs.
But when everything works, it’s such a cool experience. I hope Matter begins to make local-first a bigger priority as well. That’s a huge concern I’ve recently begun to develop.
Also I still haven’t figured out how to combine a mechanical and digital solution. Like I want light switches that match my server state for my lights. If I change the switch via my phone, I want the switches to change as well so that the physical switch is always the true state of the light.