Do reliable buttons/remotes exist?

[JDRoberts]

@Royal2000H

Now my question is… is this the current state of Z-Wave/Zigbee devices or just the state of this inexpensive device / any devices that require custom device handlers / smartthings? Are there buttons that work 99-99.9% of the time on the first try? I’d like to know before I invest further into smart devices.

As @marktheknife and @marktr said, Xiaomi only intends their buttons to work with their own gateway: There are multiple reasons why they might be unreliable in a SmartThings set up, all of which are discussed in detail in the threads on those particular buttons. So please take follow up about that brand to those threads.

[OBSOLETE] Xiaomi Sensors and Button (beta)

Following on from the thread here I’ve starting my own thread for my versions of the Xiaomi Motion, Contact and Smart Button device handler. This is so that people are able to find my device handlers easier and concentrate any discussion specific to my version of the handlers rather than previous ones made by others. I’ve kept the status as “beta” as the actual hardware do not claim official HA1.2 compliance and are very tricky to pair initially. However, once they stay successfully paired for a few hours, they have been proven over the last couple of months to be extremely reliable. However, I think it is fair to warn people that this is no guarantee that they will continue to work in the future. More information about pairing in the original thread here and here. I would suggest pe…

As far as the general reliability of buttons in recognizing the first click, the most important factor is whether the button is “awake” when you click it. There are a number of things which can affect this.

1. Mains-powered devices are always awake, so will always be more reliable as far as recognizing the first click, as long as the power is on.

2. a battery powered device which is awake more often will also use up more battery life, so different manufacturers design this differently. In addition, some manufacturers have parameter settings which let you change the sleep factor. So you can trade off per click reliability for shorter battery life if you want. This feature is generally available on the more expensive devices.

3. using the device wakes it up, which tends to mean that devices which are used frequently will be less likely to miss a click. This is one reason that different people report different experiences with the same model of a device. Someone using a battery powered device as a light switch which gets clicked two or three times a day may have fewer complaints about missed clicks than someone using the same device as a panic button which might only get used two or three times a year.

And since any click wakes up the device, multi button devices like the remotec 90 may get used more frequently, this improving the overall perceived reliability.

So there is definitely variation from model to model, but a lot also depends on exactly how you intend to use the device.

What specifically do you want the buttons for? If it’s an infrequently used light switch, I would strongly consider a mains powered device instead. There are some very reliable battery powered devices, in particular the Lutron Caseta picos, but integration with SmartThings is more complex.