7-button zigbee wall controller - I

  • Posted 4 December 2019

I recently started to add Zigbee devices to my home automation system to add some low power sensors and access to a wider range of devices than those that were purely wifi + AC power.

When you have a home full of people that are not tech savy, its important to make all the remote controlled appliances accessible from normal wall switches. I have used Insteon remotes with HomeAssistant scripts to control much of the devices in my home from "the wall".
However this is not ideal as Insteon to HA is sometimes not very reliable.
I did find that there are some North American wall switches that can support 1-4 devices but nothing that is inexpensive and is purely for control.

Then I found this 7-button zigbee scene controller, LVS-ZB-SC7. Its only $14.99 CAD (+tax/shipping)
It seems perfect - it has 7 buttons, matching leds, and fits in a decora plate so that it can live next to existing switches on the wall.
The problem is that its zigbee and the current Zigbee2MQTT code does not support it (I did try some code I had found, but to no avail).

Solution ?
See if it can be re-programmed or converted to something I can code for.

I ordered a couple units to play with. While I waited I dug into the FCC listing to see what I could find.
Seems pretty straight forward, a voltage board and a controller board. If I couldnt re-program the onboard MCU, i could probably just replace it with an ESP8266 (ESP12 most likely or ESP07S if signal was a problem)