I'm looking to replace a few in-wall light switches for lights that are not easily replaced with smart bulbs. I currently use Home Assistant with z2m for all my smart lights and switches, so zigbee switches would be preferred. Does anyone have recommendations for smart in-wall switches?
I do in-wall relays so that I can use regular, off the shelf switches and it looks like nothing special is there. I like the idea of people not knowing it's smart until I do something from my phone.
They work like regular switches. The flip of the physical switch sends the change back to home assistant to keep everything synchronicity.
I don't have any, though, so I'm not sure if you can set it to "up is always on", or if it ends up being a switch, so "whichever direction just changes the on/off state"
It makes it so that the direction of the switch doesn't matter. Flipping the switch toggles to the off or on state that it's not currently in. I like to think of it as a three-way switch that you may already have in your house where up doesn't necessarily mean 'on' because there are two switches involved. The relay in the wall is the other switch. So if you have the light on in home assistant but you flip the switch, it'll turn the light off whether it was up or down. I hope I made more sense.
If my wifi goes out my switches function as normal too.
I love my Shelly relays. I don't use the stock firmware though. I have them overwritten with ESPhome.
I have heard that you can have full local control with them now and that it's not really necessary to do a custom firmware. I just like having a configuration file that tells me exactly everything that it can do. That and I have a script running that updates all my ESPhome devices automatically.
I wish, thread just isn't there yet. I currently use Wi-Fi for most of my smart home stuff. I have a really good Wi-Fi setup though and it could support a lot of devices. I have been slowly moving to zigbee though.