homebridge-hue: FOHSWITCH is "unsupported"; I tried to support it, but not working yet.

Issue

FOHSWITCH is “unsupported”; I tried to support it, but not working yet.

Here is some of the work I’ve already done:

Here’s some buttonevents numbers for this switch:

buttonevents-bed-switch-share.gz

As you can partially see, the above switch is a four button switch, but I’ve taken the optional two rockers off and placed the optional one rocker on, so there are only two buttons that I’m programming, thus only the up and down states; you might not notice that there are actually more than two buttons from the above diagnosis as a result. These switches give out an event for button down and button up, but it looks like software turns that into a button press without release for a while (a delay sense), and button release, which does cover most of the possible interpretation use cases. These Zigbee switches give out unique events for all the combinations I’ve tested on an earlier firmware on a switch bought before Philips had implemented the FOH program fully: each of press and release for: each possible combination of buttons pressed. For instance, if I press up left, or up right, or down left, or down right, or up both left and right, or down both left and right, or up left and down right, or dow left and up right, all of those have a unique code. Now, there is a different brand that sells these same switches but that does not expose the codes for more than one button press at a time; that means when I press both up or both down (or diagonal presses, for that matter), no code is sent, and nothing happens. As a result, I have 3 of these switches in my home (2 on another “Home” in homekit so you won’t see them in my log files here), and 1 of them is programmed properly via hand-coded zigbee event responses in the Hue gateway to turn on both lights when both upper buttons are pressed and all the other obvious combinations (even diagonal!), but since that was not part of the FOH program, that switch doesn’t show up as a Homekit accessory exported by the hue bridge, but the other two FOH switches I got do show up as Homekit accessories and are much better supported by Hue & native Homekit, but do not do anything when there are more than one button presses. Not all progress is improvement. Anyway, one of those FOH switches is in my personal “Home” that you see in these logs, and I really want to have it control some non-Hue devices, so I need to expose it to homebridge, but homebridge does not yet support it.

Here is how that switch shows up in Home app with homebridge running:

As you can see, the unsupported device has a Manufacturer of “PhilipsFoH” (which is wrong; it’s a different manufacturer; but that’s how lying Philips supports it, apparently), and a Model of “FOHSWITCH”, which is a total lack of information, since there will be a zillion switch types in FoH, but that’s what we have to work with.

I found some code pieces in homebridge-hue that seem like they are templates for support of this type of switch, so I started work on them around April 14:

HueSensor.js.diff.gz

Apparently, Google Node erased those files on April 24, so before I remembered I had TimeMachine running on that host, today I tried to remember a rough version of what I edited and came up with this sort of rough draft of lib/HueSensor.js and copied the case ‘ZGPSwitch’ in the switch for (this.obj.type) to a new ‘FOHSwitch’ (which you can see in the above screenshot); you can see I was a little more detailed above on April 14 with that diff file than in this little snippet, but they are conceptually similar; the above diff code was tested and failed, but the below is just conceptual and not as complete (never tested):

//===                                                                                                                                                                                               
      } else if (
        this.obj.manufacturername === 'Philips' &&
        this.obj.modelid === 'FOHSWITCH'
      ) {
        // FOH Switch                                                                                                                                                                               
        this.createLabel(Characteristic.ServiceLabelNamespace.ARABIC_NUMERALS)
        this.createButton(1, 'UpDim', SINGLE_LONG)
        this.createButton(2, 'Up', SINGLE)
        this.createButton(3, 'DownDim', SINGLE_LONG)
        this.createButton(4, 'Down', SINGLE)
        this.type = {
          key: 'buttonevent',
          homekitValue: function (v) { return { 16: 1, 20: 2, 17: 3, 21: 4 }[v] },
          homekitAction: function () { return 0 }
//===                                                                                                                                                                                               

Log Messages

While censoring the log file, I ran across this error message which is about the switch I want supported. Note that the error message might be slightly different since I started trying to support it. Edit: looks like Google erased hours of my work, so no, that code is gone.

[4/24/2019, 5:35:24 PM] [Hue] Studio: /sensors/38: warning: unknown ZGPSwitch sensor {"state":{"buttonevent":21,"lastupdated":"2019-04-22T07:48:56"},"swupdate":{"state":"notupdatable","lastinstal\
l":null},"config":{"on":true},"name":"Bed Switch","type":"ZGPSwitch","modelid":"FOHSWITCH","manufacturername":"PhilipsFoH","productname":"Friends of Hue Switch","diversityid":"ded6468f-6b26-4a75-\
9582-f2b52d36a5a3","uniqueid":"00:00:00:00:01:70:xx:xx-xx","capabilities":{"certified":true,"inputs":[{"repeatintervals":[],"events":[{"buttonevent":16,"eventtype":"initial_press"},{"buttonevent"\
:20,"eventtype":"short_release"}]},{"repeatintervals":[],"events":[{"buttonevent":17,"eventtype":"initial_press"},{"buttonevent":21,"eventtype":"short_release"}]},{"repeatintervals":[],"events":[\
{"buttonevent":19,"eventtype":"initial_press"},{"buttonevent":23,"eventtype":"short_release"}]},{"repeatintervals":[],"events":[{"buttonevent":18,"eventtype":"initial_press"},{"buttonevent":22,"e\
venttype":"short_release"}]}]}}
[4/24/2019, 5:35:24 PM] [Hue] Studio: /sensors/38: warning: unknown ZGPSwitch sensor {"state":{"buttonevent":21,"lastupdated":"2019-04-22T07:48:56"},"swupdate":{"state":"notupdatable","lastinstal\
l":null},"config":{"on":true},"name":"Bed Switch","type":"ZGPSwitch","modelid":"FOHSWITCH","manufacturername":"PhilipsFoH","productname":"Friends of Hue Switch","diversityid":"ded6468f-6b26-4a75-\
9582-f2b52d36a5a3","uniqueid":"00:00:00:00:01:70:xx:xx-xx","capabilities":{"certified":true,"inputs":[{"repeatintervals":[],"events":[{"buttonevent":16,"eventtype":"initial_press"},{"buttonevent"\
:20,"eventtype":"short_release"}]},{"repeatintervals":[],"events":[{"buttonevent":17,"eventtype":"initial_press"},{"buttonevent":21,"eventtype":"short_release"}]},{"repeatintervals":[],"events":[\
{"buttonevent":19,"eventtype":"initial_press"},{"buttonevent":23,"eventtype":"short_release"}]},{"repeatintervals":[],"events":[{"buttonevent":18,"eventtype":"initial_press"},{"buttonevent":22,"e\
venttype":"short_release"}]}]}}

Debug Files

2019-04-24T173522-0700-censored.log.gz

homebridge-hue-censored.json.gz