Hi all, anybody have recommendations for remote, physical buttons that could be linked directly to a Cerbo GX? I’ve got a few things that I want to be able to control programmatically through Node Red using shelly relays, but I also really like having a physical switch available and not just the touchscreen.
There’s plenty of zigbee / matter options out there, but it seems like I’d have to setup a separate home assistant hub for that to work, which I’m trying to avoid.
MQTT seems easiest to directly talk to the Cerbo and control the switches, but options on wifi buttons that talk MQTT seem to be very limited.
If there’s not much I’ll either do something custom with an ESP32 or choose a different path.
Your Cerbo has 4 digital inputs and the Shellys often have an input.
I use those and a Waveshare TCP/IP 8 channel I/O module with NR in my RV. There are several I/O modules that would work, some are directly supported by the Cerbo.
I spotted a remote ESP32 OLED touchscreen that talks back to the Cerbo. I can find the link if you want.
Thank you for the reply Paul! I do like Waveshare modules, I’ve used some of their relays before. I was trying to avoid Modbus, since it involves constant polling to see the button state. I see they do have some kind of MQTT support, although it looks like it requires their cloud service. I’ll have to investigate that more.
Have you used the Cerbo digital inputs to control node red flows / switch states? I don’t see them showing up in Node Red unless they’re assigned a function from the limited list (alarms, bilge pump, etc)
I might play with the Shelly Plus i4 or the Shelly Blu buttons to see if those are easy to setup.
Reason is most likely that mqtt has a “big” energy-requirement list so to say: Wifi, somewhat decent microcontroller - both contra dictionary to maximum battery runtime for wireless switches.
I’ve also deployed a zigbee-gateway and have zigbee2mqtt on my home server handling almost all zigbee devices generically. (There are so much super cool low-power zigbee devices like motion sensors, vibration sensors, light sensors - I really regret that I haven’t added zigbee to my IoT Stack earlier )
Thanks dognose, maybe I just need to bite the bullet and add a zigbee hub of some kind. The power draw isn’t too much of an issue, I don’t mind getting power to things. And was hoping for some LED feedback on the buttons, which might drain batteries. Just trying to avoid signal wires going all over the place mostly.
You connect one of the small shellies (like a 1 pm mini) and a physical switch, where you want it. (Shellies have an Input pin for legacy 230V-switches)
And then you could use Node-Red to “sync” the state of your shelly carrying the load with the state of the switch-only shelly.
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