Hi everyone! I hope you’re all doing well. I wanted to share my experience with KNX buttons and OpenHAB, as I’ve encountered an interesting challenge and found a workaround that might be helpful for others.
For those who might not know, I’ve been using OpenHAB for a while now to manage my smart home setup. It’s been a fantastic journey, and I’ve managed to integrate a lot of devices seamlessly. However, recently I stumbled upon an issue with my KNX buttons that had me puzzled for a bit.
The problem arose when I upgraded to OpenHAB 3.3. Previously, with OpenHAB 2.x, I was using dimmer-control items to detect button presses on my KNX lights. This setup worked perfectly because the KNX binding at the time didn’t respond to read requests, allowing me to monitor button presses without interfering with the actual bus. However, after the upgrade, I noticed that OpenHAB started responding to every button press on the KNX bus. This caused a conflict with the dimmer actors, resulting in flickering lights—a frustrating issue to deal with!
I tried switching to normal dimmer items, but that didn’t solve the problem. While these items provided the state of the dimmed light, they didn’t give me the information I needed about whether someone had pressed the on/off button or used the dim function. This was crucial for my automation setup, so I needed a solution.
After some research and experimentation, I found a workaround that seems to be effective. By using read-only items, I can detect button presses without causing interference on the KNX bus. This approach allows me to monitor the state changes caused by button presses while keeping the lights stable. It’s not the most elegant solution, but it gets the job done and maintains the functionality I need.
I’m curious to know if others have encountered similar issues or if there are alternative solutions that I might not have considered yet. If anyone has tips or tricks for handling KNX button interactions in OpenHAB, I’d love to hear about them!
Thanks for reading, and happy automating!
Best regards,
Norbert