The Phoscon app and switches

Saturday, November 28, 2020 at 7:10 PM UTC

Today I noticed a weird issue using the Phoscon app. For all who are not aware: this is the software that is used to setup smart stuff on the Conbee Zigbee gateway.

Every time you add a new switch, it will create a new group. Depending on the device type the group's name is different.

I was at IKEA today to buy a LED panel (FLOALT 30x90) for the ceiling in one room and I also bought 4 switches for the corridor lights. The switches are cheap (6 Euros) and look quite decent.

To add such a switch you have to select "IKEA" as vendor and then the simple on/off switch, not the dimmer remote. Once added, I renamed it etc. After restarting Homebridge to populate them to Homekit, too, I noticed also a new "light" for each switch:

The Phoscon app automatically added a group for each switch - I don't know why it does this. However, the group was only visible in Homebridge/in the Home app - with no use at all as there were no lights to control. It's just clutter if you ask me. The group wasn't visible in the Phoscon app though. If so I then could have deleted, renamed or even added lights to them - but no. With this constellation it was just useless and the name also is invalid as it contains the slash.

After some research I found a post where someone mentioned the App "Hue Essentials". This works with Hue bridges and also with normal Zigbee gateways such as the Conbee stick. This app showed the empty and useless groups and here I was able to delete them. After another restart of Homebridge even the Home app now was tidied up again.

The first two switches are used to control the corridor lights just for on and off (though you can use a long press on each key for other actions, too - but only when you configure them in Homekit itself). As this is just a simple function I decided to set them up directly on the Phoscon app and not in Homekit. It is a bit tricky when you do this for the first time - you have to add the switch and then you must set up each key individually. It works fine in general.

The FLOALT panel though does not work with the Zigbee gateway and I have to buy the IKEA dimmer remote - which should work with Conbee. I guess I am fine when I just use the IKEA remote to switch it on and off.

Update

I noticed, once I added new stuff to Phoscon, those obscure groups appear again - you have to clean up every time you add a new device Angry






Latest comments to this post

Oliver wrote on 16.12.2021, 21:26

Sorry, Robert

I returned the FLOALT panel so no updates here.

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Robert Friberg wrote on 16.12.2021, 20:09

> The FLOALT panel though does not work with the Zigbee gateway

Do you have any information about this and how I would go about integrating them with my homeassistant + rasberry pi + conbee 2?

I had it all working with trådfri gateway but would like to have a everything unified in homeassistant.

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Martin wrote on 30.11.2020, 16:28

Thanks Oliver, I'll ask Google for the Conbee 2 gateway.

Regards from Spain

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Oliver Busse wrote on 30.11.2020, 14:43

Martin,

the stand-alone gateway is expensive, but I use the Conbee 2 gateway (USB stick) for about 40 EUR in Germany. Phoscon is a brand name and also the name of the software to setup the gatway.

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Martin wrote on 29.11.2020, 16:56

Phoscon gateway 175€ on Amazon.

Very expensive 

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