I've read about various in-wall switches and some other devices (like battery-powered portable or on-wall scene controllers) supporting double pushes, and in fact some of them mention absurd numbers of pushes (absurd to keep track of in my head! But it's fine, I don't have to use it, if it really doesn't work for me to use that feature).
Is that common or rare? How do I tell if my device supports it? And if my device supports it, how do I access it in scripting?
Also, speaking of in-wall controllers, is there an AC-powered in-wall scene controller available? All the ones I can find are battery-powered, and I hate building battery-powered things into my house with a fiery passion (and I hate running around replacing batteries, and I hate the ever-growing number of kinds of batteries you need to stock, and so forth; possibly I am becoming a grumpy old man?). I guess any in-wall switch can be used as an in-wall button, you can access that in programming, but it'd be more powerful if you could access multi-pushes too.
What devices do you have? Devices with doublePress are supposed to list that as a capability in their driver, but some devices don’t do this (Inovelli) and opt to list their button presses as held/pressed, 1-7.
Enerwave ZWN-SC7 (discontinued), Leviton VRSC-4, and Eaton 5-button all come to mind
Inovelli is also working one one — you can learn more about theirs on their forums.
I am, to some extent, benefiting from sitting on my X-10 home automation setup for a few decades (last house, this house) before trying to move on :-).
(And thanks for your useful answers on the specific questions)
The ones installed are Jasco Ultra-Pro in-wall smart dimmers. I've been reading specs widely for a month, so no idea what all I've read! Clearly not everything, since new things keep turning up.
It might have been Qubino modules that I saw the serious discussion of multiple switch presses (some of those can be configured with two external switches, too -- if the wiring allows). I have a couple of uses for something like that.
There's also a fascinating case using a module as an alternative to a no-neutral in-wall dimmer. Especially if you have to mess with the fixture anyway, putting a module up there, where the neutral is (in my old house every ceiling light I have checked is wired with a switch-loop so no neutral in the switch box) and reconfiguring the wires so the old switch-loop wires down to the box actually wire a momentary button in the wall box to the switch terminals on the module, and programming the module to do more than one thing based on button presses sounds kinda interesting. Maybe even useful!
Sure, there are a huge range of battery-powered non-wired controllers, and I will probably end up with some, maybe even some mounted to the wall (not wired into the wall).
But I have a strong preference for avoiding batteries in anything as mission-critical as light switches, if I reasonably can.
Yeah I use the Inovelli Red series switches (not dimmers) for my in-wall installations. I turn off the local control and then use the button presses for scene control. They allow for up to five taps but the most I have is three taps on one switch. One tap for override white, and two for override scenes. I wouldn't remember much more than that.
the light switch here is actually behind the 75" tv. lol so i leave it on with white temp bulbs and control with this.. never has missed a keypress. There is a stock driver as well. aaa batteries havent replaced in over a year.
Little thread hijacking here. What is the best practice to use double taps as a rule override?
I have this scenario for example. I have a motion sensor that turns on the lights when it detects motion.
I want to override this by double tapping. What I did was, I created a virtual switch, which is a condition for the light to turn on.
The virtual switch is controlled by the double taps using the app "buttons controllers" So that double tap on turns the virtual switch on, and double tap off turn the virtual switch off.
Don't mind the hijack; I haven't gotten far enough into complicated programming to have any useful ideas, but will be happy to learn from anybody else who shows up.
As an FYI - Z-Wave supports up to 5 taps (depending on device), as well as "Hold" and "Release" for a button.
However, Hubitat has only defined capabilities for up to 2 taps, plus hold and release. There are various kludges in drivers to handle this either using custom attributes or by mapping the extra taps to buttons. For example, a two button device might register push, hold, tap, double-tap on buttons 1 and 2, but map triple and 4x tap on button #1 to a "phantom" button #3 having them appear as a single / double tap. I find that approach a bit confusing and in drivers I've written I define a new attribute "multiTapButton" which can handle up to 5 taps on a button (I explain that method a bit more here: Homeseer HS-WD200 Dimmer Button Mapping with drivers here GitHub - jvmahon/HubitatCustom), but there really isn't a standard way of doing more than 2 taps.
Thanks! I probably don't want to go really crazy with this anyway, I'm just starting to look and trying to figure out the capabilities. I think I'll have some hardware that does support double to experiment with soon, too.
I'm certainly not above using non-standard drivers, though, if I want the features. Or even doing a little hacking myself, maybe (I've done some simple Windows drivers and unix device drivers, plus proprietary embedded environments, so on the one hand the idea doesn't scare me off and on the other I have some idea how much work it can be).
