Zigbee 3.0 button controller $8.88 USD at home Depot, includes cct bulb

Well, if they get the remote working on SmartThings first, I will have a bunch of cheap zigbee remotes on my ST hub and have to "HubConnect" them to HE. I assume that I will be able to do that.

The box also says:
"Remote and App Cannot Be Used at the Same Time"

As i mentioned in previous post, I got one remote to control the 7 bulbs in my master bath vanity. I just paired a 2nd remote to Hubitat then Touch-Link'd to an 8th bulb in a lamp in master bedroom. Everything worked like it should but when I went to turn off the lamp, it also turned off all of the bulbs in bathroom vanity. That's not good. Any idea why or how that could happen?

Turn it off from the remote or from Hubitat? Was the remote originally paired to any of the first 7 bulbs?

I am pretty sure that the 2nd remote I used was in a box with the 8th bulb but I could be wrong. All of the bulbs turned off using the 2nd remote after I touchlink'd it to 8th bulb in Master Lamp.

I still have a couple that I haven't even pulled outta box. I am going to try to use one of those remotes to see if I get same result. I got the typical look from my wife as it relates to home automation as the bathroom lights flashed on and off with remote. Thank God she has patience with me.

I have a fully functional experience using zigbee2mqtt and a Hubitat device driver that connects via mqtt - since this thread has a lot of different discussions, I've consolidated that into a single "Release" thread here:

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I tried it with a remote straight out of box, same behavior. The new remote controlled all of the bulbs and the original remote that controlled the 7 vanity lights no longer worked. Weird. At this point, I will sit back and see if men smarter than me can figure it out. Right now, I am happy that I have a remote to control lights and HE can control them also. AND it only cost $4.88 each for CT Bulbs!

I'm having the same issue, if someone finds a solution please let me know.

Can you please share more details on how you did this? Specifically how do you put the hue hub in touchlink mode?

You'll need a third-party app to enable Touch Link on the Hue Bridge. The app Hue Lights is often recommend for this (no in-app purchases are necessary for this functionality). I've described everything else I remember above, and I think that's all I had to do.

Thanks - that's what I was missing. Now when I put the hub in touch link mode it keeps looking for a device and eventual never finds it, on the remote it blinks a few times. So I am assuming that it connected. I then did the pairing with bulb got three flashes from the bulb. However the remote doesnt seem to control the bulb. Any ideas?
One other question - after doing the reset pin push I see lights on the remote flashing, when you start the touch link thing (dim + on/off) after the lights finish flashing or during ?

I can't remember the exact details of the remote LED anymore, but I think I reset the remote, waited a few seconds, put the Bridge in Touch Link mode, then held the buttons as indicated on the remote (which needs to be very close to the Bridge--I'm always within a couple inches). I think they maybe slow blinked until it was successful and then fast blinked, but I might be wrong. I had to try twice because it tried to steal a nearby light bulb first, but I'm not sure what I did differently. You won't see any feedback on the Hue side.

A way to test it afterwards is to Touch Link it to a Hue-paired bulb. If it doesn't steal the bulb off Hue, you're good. :slight_smile:

Where I left mine for now:

  1. Paired bulbs to Hubitat (factory reset bulb with power cycle)
  2. Paired remote to Hubitat (factory reset remote with pin) and tried Aeon Minimote - Also tried Aeotec NanoMote
  3. Touch link process on each bulb

Now I have full Hubitat control of lights and remote can fully control lights (on/off/dim/color temp). Hubitat also seemed to get some battery levels of remote.

80% functional, would love to eventually be able to use remote beyond the ecosmart bulbs as a generic input though.
Speaking from a point of ignorance, It seems this might be possible. On a couple occasions (can not repeat) Hubitat registered "Ecosmart Remote button null was pushed" and "Ecosmart Remote button null was held" - I am not sure after messing around with it so much and have not been able to get it to do it again. (It is possible/likely I did this accidently in Hubitat panel) Also as Aeon MiniMote the remote reports 4 buttons.

thanks for input - I will try that, was trying with Hue hub but can't get the remote to control the light.

I was thinking of using one bulb in each room linked to the remote and using the light status to control other things. I was thinking I would keep the bulb in a couple of rooms and for other places bust the bulb itself and get rid of the LEDs that would eliminate most of the power consumption then track the state of the bulb - so Remote-->light bulb-->HE rules-->other devices. Wonder if I can just pull the circuitry and run off DC and eliminate high voltage as well. At 4.88 its a cheap experiment.

I mentioned above that in my experience, using the Touch Link-ed remote to a Hue Bridge bulb did not result in the Hue Bridge "seeing" the bulb's changed status. Even if it did, you'd be using Hubitat's Hue Bridge integration, and Hue's HTTP API is polling-only, so it would take at least a few seconds (but often up to 1 minute, Hubitat's default polling interval) to get the changes into Hubitat and trigger other automations. I have no idea if Hubitat would "see" the changes if paired directly to the hub, but I wouldn't count on that behavior being different--and I'd be wary of pairing Zigbee bulbs to the hub for well-documented reasons.

While $4.88 is indeed a cheap remote (to say nothing of the fact that it also includes a CT bulb), this definitely seems like an odd and unreliable way to accomplish that goal. :slight_smile: There are some other cheap button devices (the SmartThings Button is currently $11.99 on Amazon and not much more normally, though it has far fewer buttons; if you want a lot of button devices, Picos are often available for around $13 and require the Smart Bridge Pro or RA2 but will balance out in price if you get enough). But nothing to stop you from experimenting!

The Minimote and NanoMote drivers are for Z-Wave devices, there is no way these drivers will report battery level or anything close to button presses for a Zigbee device of any type.

It didn't steal bulb from Hue, the bulb blinked 3 times - but then it didn't control the bulb either.

I tested it with the ecosmart bulb, Tradfri outlet, and a GE/Jasco Zigbee Switch (the GE device isn't easy to setup as it doesn't support touchlink) and all reported changes to Hubitat. The ecosmart seemed to report on/off and dimming correctly but the color temp was wrong. A refresh showed the correct value.

I don't agree with broad statements about Zigbee bulbs. There are certainly Zigbee bulbs with issues (I had GE link and Osram Lightify bulbs that had issues). If the Zigbee 3.0 certification isn't covering the routing then we would have more than bulb issues be now. All the bulbs that I am aware with issues started as ZLL devices with a Marvell SOC. There maybe others but unless we have a lot reports or actual testing of the routing performance (preferable) then I would expect the newer bulbs to perform the same as other devices from the same OEM and firmware base.

Ah, I see, thanks for pointing that out, i guess these came in as generic "Device"

|battery|97|%|Ecosmart Remote battery is 97%|DEVICE||2019-12-18 02:25:00.688 AM CST|
|battery|98|%|Ecosmart Remote battery is 98%|DEVICE||2019-12-18 02:25:00.492 AM CST|
|battery|99|%|Ecosmart Remote battery is 99%|DEVICE||2019-12-18 02:25:00.283 AM CST|
|battery|100|%|Ecosmart Remote battery is 100%|DEVICE||2019-12-18 02:25:00.265 AM CST|

Controlling the lights with the touchlink remote does create an immediate status update on the light's dashboard page so I expect you can easily create a rule but I have not yet.