Hi there,
I am doing a project for a friend’s new appartment and am looking for a way to control a hue setup with custom / cheaper switches.
They already own a bunch of hue bulbs linked to a Philips Hue bridge from their previous appartment. They are also familiar to the Hue App and dont want to switch systems. All the wall switches are push buttons connected to an analog dimmer box which doesnt play well with the smart bulbs.
They dont want to replace their wall switches if possible so we looked for a box to put where the dimmer was, ideally programmable with the original app.
There is the Philips Wall Switch Module but it is battery powered (no-go) and expensive.
We bought a sonoff zbmini box but it doesn’t work with the wiring - only a single wire comes back from the switches and they switch against L. We tried, with precautions of course, to bridge L and ref but no luck.
The perfect device would be Shelly Plus i4. Does anyone have experience with it together with diyhue?
I read on different points that Shelly devices are supported but I couldnt find a compatibility list or anything about using them as input.
I’ll borrow a Shelly 1 from a friend tomorrow and do some testing. It has an independant input and should be the same as the i4 in theory, just with less buttons.
I have a Hue Bridge to play around and some Ikea bulbs already linked to the bridge.
I successfully linked hue emulator on a Raspberry Pi 4 to the bridge and my phone apps, and set up the rooms. i can control the bulbs trough the hue emulator without problems.
Where the old dimmer sits, there would be also enough space for a small enclosure with an ESP + power supply.
I have two boards here, an ESP8266 (Lolin NodeMCU v3) and an ESP32 (Doit Devkit v1), and tried to set them up as switches.
These board were laying around for some, I am not sure they are 100% okay, but ESPhome works on both.
ESP32 HueTapSwitch works mostly, but when I hold down a button for longer than a split second, the internal LED starts flashing very fast and it doesnt send anymore. Also it only showed up in the Essentials app but thats ok, and the delay was inconsistent and much more than with a original Hue Tap.
I was not able to get any of the ESP32 light arduino sketches running. They compile but the hotspot won’t come up. I guess some things changed in libraries or the IDE, or its not compatible with my board. it says -C3 in the titles but I have a -wroom32.
ESP8266 sketches work in general, I was able to control a cheap RGB strip with the Hue app 
The pre-compiled v4 images did not. They dont show the web ui correctly, it is impossible to get to the settings page. Tried with edge and firefox.
The tap and dimmer switch also didnt work for me; I dont have transistors handy, tried pulling up or down the switch inputs but was unsure about the reset pin. Also no debug output on switch presses but maybe I wasnt patient enough with this one.
ESPhome works with both boards, I can control an LED with Hue for example but I didnt see any option to use it as input in diyhue. I did configure multiple switches in ESPhome.
Furthermore, buts that is less important, I would appreciate some help/pointers to get the emulator running on a Pi Zero as I have a few laying around. The install script fails because it cannot find some packages and Docker didnt seem to work at all anymore on ARMv6l, not even the helloworld container. Tried with fresh Pi OS lite lagacy.
For OpenWRT, are there any devices/architectures that you can confirm working? Is this a future-proof solution or more likely to break with some random dependancy update?
I really appreciate any help or pointers to material I might have missed. I read all the readme’s on github and most of the documentation multiple times.
If you want me to share code I used or to test anything, please let me know.
Cheers and have a nice weekend everyone!
Martin