Color temp control from switch

Lighting Wiki & How-To's
1

Does anyone know a way in home assistant to “hold config button and then use the paddle to change the color temp of the linked bulbs”?

2

I don’t believe that capability exists out of the box. But you could probably do it with an automation.

Here is a hub-agnostic automation flow that should work:

Define one automation that will temporarily allow the paddle to change the color temp:

  • Create a binary variable, vAllowColorTempChangeViaPaddle, for example.
  • Create an automation to set vAllowColorTempChangeViaPaddle to yes, wait X minutes, then set it to no. Trigger on something like a 2x or 3x config press. This will allow for the color change via the paddle for a specified time.

Create the color temp change automation:

  • IF vAllowColorTempChangeViaPaddle is yes, THEN change the color temp based on what whatever paddle presses you specify. If you have multiple temperatures then you may have to stack IFs or use ELSEs. Use multi-taps so that you don’t trigger the single-tap action.

If you don’t mind the paddle presses changing the color temperature all the time, then you can ignore the variable part.

3

I tried playing around with making better use of the config button to enable different modes (in my case, control of our smart shades). The problem is this only works if you don’t bind your switch to the lights by zigbee because when the user presses up and down on the switch, regardless of what the automation is doing, the switch will be sending off and on commands to the bound lights at the same time.

I abandoned this because the benefits of having the lights directly bound to the switch are too high. If you’re not using zigbee binding, I think there is a lot you could do here. You could also potentially make use of config_held / config_release actions to try to do it only while the config button is held down as OP suggested, but I’m not sure if the network response time would be fast enough for it to work reliably.

If there were a way to temporarily disable the zigbee commands in the automation, or someone has some other idea about how to handle that aspect, I definitely have a small list of things I would automate. Using automations and zigbee binding together is something that seems difficult to do well sometimes with the switches, as great as they are. I suppose I could try to temporarily enable localprotection, but I worry about accidentally leaving the switches in the state if something happens in the automation.

4

I’m pretty sure that if you disable local control, it will kill the binding commands. So the idea would be to temporarily disable local control in your script and then re-enable it when you’re done.