I have my GE Zigbee 45856GE switches configured to automatically turn off after 15 minutes of being switched on (single “on” tap). I’m currently doing this with a power allowance trigger that automatically turns the switch off after 15 minutes. This works great for things that are routinely left on by accident. Think closet light, or bathroom fan.
In order to be able keep the switch on indefinitely I’d like to “double on tap” the switch. Is this possible?
If not, is this a limitation of the Zigbee protocol, SmartThings, or the GE (Jasco) Zigbee firmware?
It’s not possible with that particular switch because the nature of the Mesh protocol is that it’s really hard to get precise timing. And even harder when you have a cloud platform involved like smartthings. And in the case of that particular model, it doesn’t send the information back to smartthings that you would need in any case.
There are now a number of Z wave switches which offer double tap, triple tap and even more, but it all cases the tap pattern is captured in the switch itself and then it sends a single code to the hub to let it know which tap pattern it received.
Switches which have this capability will note it in the product description.
You can certainly do it with zigbee, but not with that particular model as that switch itself doesn’t send the necessary information when turned on at the wall.
There are more consumer friendly low cost DIY zigbee devices coming out every day because of the popularity of the Amazon echo system.
So my personal guess is that we will see a low-cost DIY zigbee switch with double tap capability within a year, but that’s just a guess.
Just as one example, there is a new line of zigbee green power batteryfree switches Which just came out in the last month or two. They have four codes from one switch. They don’t work with smartthings yet, But they do work with the hue bridge and HomeKit via the hue bridge. So we are starting to see more options.
