I ordered my W200 thermostat the morning that it launched! I have been playing with it in my Home Assistant environment since. I wish all my smart devices were Aqara but they are not and some go back several years.
The thermostat is great and it is also now set up as a Thread border router… But I was hoping it could do a lot more!
As a first step…
Is it possible to create a virtual (screen) button on the Aqara and have the Matter integration with Home Assistant expose that as an entity that can then control things like switches, lights etc. in HA? I
Please excuse me if this happens already, I cant see the entity in HA!
You can’t expose one of the virtual screen buttons to Home Assistant as it only goes the other way around: you can add zigbee or matter devices to the W200 hub and associate them with the buttons.
If the HA entities you’re interested in aren’t Matter-based, you might want to look into Matterbridge. That will allow you to take entities in HA and bridge them to any Matter platform such as an aqara matter hub like the W200.
I tried it, and it does work with the virtual buttons in the W200 screen. IIRC, you have to create a Scene for it if it’s not an Aqara device, and then you can associate it with a virtual button.
Cool! thats a good start. I installed HA bridge and I have linked devices to the W200 hub using Matter in the Device Linking & Screen Settings button. However they do not appear as child devices to the W200 hub, the appear as child devices to the higher level Aqara app and the W200 says no useful devices… I need to do more digging but if anyone has solved this it would be great to hear! I really hope to put cleaning routines for the robot vac onto a screen on the W200 as they sit right near each other. One day!
So for non-Aqara devices, you have to first create a scene for what you want to do, then you can add the scene to one of the virtual buttons in the W200 screen config.
OK, so that worked. It is a a slog to get working but here is what I finally did.
I have a Roborock which puts the routines (clean kitchen for example) into Home assistant as a button.
That button got put into a home assistant automation so that when the button is pressed the Robot will come out that night to clean, not right away.
THAT automation is turned back into ?(an entity) by matter hub as US Steve describes
Here things break down and you need to do a custom Name mapping because the Home Assistant entity name is different that what Aqara wants. If you dont map the Home Assistant name to the Custom Device Name you wont be able to seen in Aqara what is what. So make an entry for each entity in the custom mapping (could not immediately get the .json import to work)
Then start the bridge going in Matter Hub and share/add that “device”(bridge) back into Aqara through Matter.
YEA, now finally you have Home Assistant automations in Aqara.
Next wrap each of those new entities as scenes in Aqara because only scenes can be assigned to buttons in W200??? (as USSteve points out)
you can finally assign the scene to a soft button in the W200. No icons, just text displays so be careful with the first characters in your naming
NEXT! - time to tackle… Door sensors. (EG dont let the heat run when the door is open!) Anyone tackled that one?