External Update of LEDs

[saucedge]

Thanks for this project, it's great! This is probably a long shot, but I would love to be able to update the knob LEDs on my PCPanel Mini by external trigger. I want to be able to click a knob to fire a Home Assistant automation... which I think I can do today by triggering a webhook command pretty easily. But then, I want to be able to reflect the status of some switch in Home Assistant on the LEDs (LED on when lights are on, LED blinks when doorbell rings... that kind of thing). Any chance that could be possible? Thanks again!

[nvdweem]

I was thinking about how to go about this in an api way, but since you mention Home Assistant, I'm expecting you already have an mqtt server running? If not, it's not very hard to set up (if you use Home Assistant OS, it's just an add-on).

Communication from and to mqtt shouldn't be very hard and I think that there are some auto-discovery ways to have devices show up in Home Assistant. That way it should be possible to get a device with lights for the led's and values for the sliders/buttons.

That sounds quite awesome. I'll try to find some time to explore this as a new feature.

Not sure if it's brilliant or insane, but I'd imagine that with a small pcb to handle the mqtt stuff, the PCPanel Pro would kinda be an awesome device to have mounted on a wall :D

[saucedge]

"Not sure if it's brilliant or insane" should formally be my personal motto... I definitely have MQTT running and almost suggested it first but didn't want to be overly prescriptive. I've certainly never written any code myself, but I'm quite proficient at copying other people's code if there's any way I can help... just let me know. I suppose if you're going to integrate MQTT, you should consider including the knobs too and not just the LEDs. MQTT would be more reliable than running local webhook scripts for folks who want to control external things. Very cool, thanks!

[nvdweem]

Getting there :)

I might currently be flooding mqtt with messages and leds and buttons are not in Home Assistant yet :).

Also no idea if it currently works with the mini.

Hmm, also now noticing how HA shows the device manufacturer, might change that because now it looks like it's from an official source.

[nvdweem]

It's not fully done yet, but the new snapshot should have a workable initial implementation with all analog values, lights and buttons.
I'm not sure if binary_sensor is the correct type for the buttons, but those should work as well.

The led's don't allow setting a brightness, but there is a global brightness slider (like in the UI).

I think I should implement that MQTT can be leading. Right now, if you start the software it will write it's current state to mqtt, overwriting what is already there. I think it should retrieve it.

I think it currently also only works if the software is configured with static colors.

[nvdweem]

Another few tweaks.

• It's now possible to enable availability. This means that Home Assistant will set the devices as unavailable when the software is not running. I'm usually not a fan of this myself because it is something you have to take into account when building automations, but it's a feature now (enabled by default because I think it's the HA way)
• Dial/Slider values are not debounced anymore but they are throttled. This means that the moment they move, a message will be sent and then every 250ms, instead of nothing until the dial wasn't moved for 250ms
• The connection to the mqtt server should be re-triggered after the connection was lost
• I tweaked the icons. There are more similar icons now, but the lights aren't generic bulbs anymore
• Turning off an led in Home Assistant will reset it to the color that's configured in the software, if you want it to turn 'off' send a color like #000001

I think I'm now leaning towards not letting mqtt 'win' over the profile. A restart of the software should reset the device state I think.

I should be able to implement the gradient features for the dials and sliders as well, but I don't think there is much of a point to that, at least not from Home Assistant as it's awkward to control 1 thing with 2 lights. Home Assistant also allows for effects for lights but I haven't implemented any of those yet either.

I'm thinking that the feature should be mostly complete. I could make the throttle configurable, but I'm thinking that that would be too configurable :).
Let me know if you have any additional wishes for this feature.

[saucedge]

Freaking sweet... I will definitely give this a try on my mini as soon as I can tomorrow. I'll report back on how it goes--thanks!

[saucedge]

I gave snapshot 1.7 a whirl and I'm super excited! I have the PCPanel mini with static colors configured, MQTT enabled, Discovery enabled. Here are my observations:

• All dials work and the responsiveness looks great to me.
• Dial clicks come through perfectly
• Confirmed that the brightness does not work for individual LEDs. Trying to change the brightness behaves the same as turning off in that it reverts to the "default" static color.
• The discovered Device Name in Home Assistant appears to be the serial number. It would certainly be prettier to make the device name "PCPanel Mini" or whatever the product name is if that's possible.
• Button status starts as "Unknown" until each is actually clicked. I think there's a way to default/assume "Off" unless I'm miss-remembering.
• The Off is the only part that isn't workable on my side. As you mentioned, toggling off the light in Home Assistant reverts the LED to the static color. I think you saw that sending black as #000000 also doesn't work which is why you said to send #000001... but that's giving me a dark blue color that's just as bright as all of the other LEDs. We'll definitely need to be able to find a way to toggle off to be fully useful... maybe I can set the static color as off or something like that?
  

Thanks, nice work!

[nvdweem]

All dials work and the responsiveness looks great to me.

Great. It's always kinda hard to find a value for throttling that is responsive enough but doesn't flood the system. I think I should still look into whether HA suggests something about this. 4 times a second already has a real chance to reach the Zigbee Group limit for instance.

Dial clicks come through perfectly

Great. I did remember I had implemented a double click option a while back and I'm not triggering that event. I'll try to add it later.

Confirmed that the brightness does not work for individual LEDs. Trying to change the brightness behaves the same as turning off in that it reverts to the "default" static color.

Yeah, I'll have to look into how that works. The HA stuff works with the HA Templating so there must be ways to do some color calculating.

The discovered Device Name in Home Assistant appears to be the serial number. It would certainly be prettier to make the device name "PCPanel Mini" or whatever the product name is if that's possible.

I thought about that, but figured that that would cause naming collisions for anybody who actually has more of these things. The serial number is kind-off an invitation to just rename the device, it gives all the separate sensors better names if you do that too.

Button status starts as "Unknown" until each is actually clicked. I think there's a way to default/assume "Off" unless I'm miss-remembering.

I think this is because I don't populate the button topics until a button is pressed. I think I also don't retain those topics. I don't think there is a real reason why not to do that so I'll change the behavior.

The Off is the only part that isn't workable on my side. As you mentioned, toggling off the light in Home Assistant reverts the LED to the static color. I think you saw that sending black as #000000 also doesn't work which is why you said to send #1... but that's giving me a dark blue color that's just as bright as all of the other LEDs. We'll definitely need to be able to find a way to toggle off to be fully useful... maybe I can set the static color as off or something like that?

If you set the color in the PCPanel interface to black, then turning off the led in HA will turn off the led in the UI, but that requires having HA setup to have full control over the led which sucks.

I think it should be possible to change the behavior into having the turn off command write a non-color value that is recognized as don't care about this value in mqtt (removing the topic or something).

[archer37]

@nvdweem This look spectacular - I in no way need this function, but I can't wait go get it setup with my HomeAssistant none the less!

Also, just wanted to say thanks for undertaking this whole project - I would not have ordered a PCPanel before finding out someone had made some open software for it to allow for control in case the developer decides to abandon it. Also appreciate the Linux love!

[nvdweem]

Home Assistant seems to treat colors weird. Setting #000001 will actually set #0000ff (it does this with Hue lights as well) and then you will have to lower the brightness yourself. I hadn't implemented brightness, so that did not work great :).

It might be needed to use the Clear all topics option in the settings. I'm not entirely sure if Home Assistant updates devices nicely if you don't.

Changes:

• The button topics should populate on startup, this should show the states correctly without clicking them once first
• Turning off al light in Home Assistant will actually turn off the light.
  • If you want to stop overriding the color you should either set it to an invalid color in mqtt (HA probably won't allow that) or use the stop_override light effect in Home Assistant
• Setting the brightness in HA should work
• The buttons already had sensors for their states, they now also have events which will trigger click or double_click
  • The click event will be delayed when the Don't click until it's sure that it won't be a double click option is enabled
  • The events have the same 'issue' as the sensors had, but I don't think I can populate them without actually triggering the event

@archer37: Thanks 👍. I had hoped that more people would join in the development of the software (there were people saying that they would if the PCPanel people would open source it), but at least the software won't die if the original authors stop supporting it. I'm not actively using Linux myself so that version is sadly limited in what it does.