Physical interface with only an OLED display, a rotary encoder and an ESP8266

[desliem]

This project, Domoticz Button, was inspired by a a similar project by David Conran (crankyoldgit) Kitchen Button, that uses the same hardware to control Tasmota switches directly. Instead, Domoticz Button controls Domoticz virtual devices which in turn control real IoT devices that may or may not be running Tasmota. That includes scenes, groups, switches, dimmers, push-off buttons and selector switches and probably more in the future.

In my (humble) opinion it is, pound for pound, a surprisingly efficient controller at least for a small system. Right now 28 devices, scenes, and groups in the house are controlled with a Domoticz Button. Status of devices is updated very quickly, even faster than in the Domoticz web interface.The remaining free ESP8266 GPIO pins could be used to add a relay and a push-button to control another physical device or to connect other sensors to monitor the temperature. Perhaps I will add a buzzer to accompany the visual alarms the Button can raise when, for example, the garage door is left open.

Communication between the Domoticz Button and Domoticz is done through MQTT messages. For those that do not want to use an MQTT broker, it would not be too difficult to use the HTTP JSON API to send commands to the Domoticz server but it would then be necessary to poll the server to get changes in device status which would not be quite as efficient. As it is, the Domoticz Button polls Domoticz only once, at boot time, to get the current status of all controlled devices and then it relies on MQTT messages published by Domoticz to update the status of devices in real time.

Thanks to David Conran for a great idea and thanks to everyone on this forum for all the help found here. Best Holiday wishes and let's hope for a much better New Year.