I’m excited for Project BFF but the more I play around with Home Assistant and the more smart devices I add to my house, I feel like my ability to control them well is becoming more and more tied to my smart phone interface due to its flexibility in showing a variety of contextual content.
I have Inovelli switches across most of my downstairs but I still use Casetta in my bedroom, specifically because of their remote. Both my wife and I have one on our nightstands and it just works, smooth and fast which makes the wife happy.
I’d love to have that…and more.
One of my favorite features on my switches downstairs are the scene controls. I use a double down click after 8:00 PM to lock the front door and shut the garage door (in the future it will arm the security system).
I have a variety of other scenes I use in different rooms as well and I would like to control them with a remote, whether it be from my bed or on the couch in the family room.
In a perfect world, a single remote could handle a wide variety of scenes. I’ve been considering something like the Xaoimi cube due to the variety of events it can trigger. But when I consider my wife trying to use it, I have a chuckle and a shiver thinking of the conversations that would cause.
(TL/DR)
And now I get to the point…a zwave remote with 3+ buttons with e-ink displays. In addition to the buttons a slider or some sort of “scene selector” that would change the image and function of the buttons depending on the selection. They could also be changed via room beacons, time of day or other automations to intelligently determine the optimal function at the moment of use.
The e-ink display is an important feature as it enables the other users in my house to use the remote without a cheat sheet or a week long boot camp training session.
I realize this would be a significantly costlier device than Project BFF but it’s flexibility and ability to be more of a “universal remote” would help justify the premium.
Anyway, love your stuff, love the company attitude.
