Add THIRDREALITY Zigbee Button to Home Assistant

In this guide, I’ll show you how to add a Third Reality 3-button remote to Home Assistant using ZHA (Zigbee Home Automation).

I don’t know about you, but I sometimes just check Amazon for products to add to my smart home. Sometimes it’s to see what other products are available that might perform better than what I’m currently using. I stumbled across these colorful Third Reality zigbee buttons a few weeks, and decided to pick up a 3-pack.

These cost about $16 each, which is about half the price of the Aeotec buttons I currently use. They come in 4 colors – red, white, yellow, or blue. I think the reason I decided to try them out was because all the other buttons I’ve seen are all white. Plus, I thought my kids would like the colorful options.

These buttons/remotes have 3 control settings – single press, double press, and button hold, all of which get exposed to Home Assistant without any issue. They also use 2 AAA batteries instead of the coin batteries that are in almost everything else.

I’ve been using these daily for the last couple of weeks, so I decided to write a quick how-to setup tutorial in case you too, are looking for a new smart button to add to HA.

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Box Contents

These buttons come with a setup guide, 9 stickers, and a sticky magnetic patch, and a piece of double-sided tape.

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Add Device to Home Assistant

Assuming you are using Zigbee Home Automation (ZHA), then this device gets added to Home Assistant basically the same way as any other device you’ve added. A lot of the Amazon reviews state that this button works quite well with zigbee2mqtt, also.

To add it:

Log into Home Assistant. Then go to Settings > Integrations > ZHA.

Click Add Device.

ZHA is now in pairing mode.

Slide the button open.

Remove the clear plastic tab from between the battery and the battery terminal. This turns the button on and automatically into pairing mode. The button will also flash blue.

A few seconds later, you’ll see that it’s successfully been added to Home Assistant!

Just rename the device and choose a room.

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Reboot Home Assistant

I’ve never had to reboot HA after adding a device, but I spent far to long trying to figure out the button presses weren’t registering. I finally decided to restart, and it worked right away.

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Find Device ieee to use with your automations

After adding to HA, you might immediately think you can create automations for each of the button presses. Unfortunately, the only device trigger that’s available is if the device goes offline.

So, we’ll need to listen to the events to figure out the device ieee, which is a unique identifer used for each button. We can then use Event Type as a trigger in HA instead of Device like the screenshot above. To find the device ieee:

Go to Developer Tools > Events tab.

Enter zha_event to the Listen to events field. Then click Start Listening.

You should see something like this displayed.

If you don’t, you can also find the device ieee by going to Settings > Devices & Services > Devices tab > search for your device > expand Zigbee info, and locate it.

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Create Single Press Automation

For this example, I’m creating a simple automation that turns my office lamp off when the button is pressed.

Create a new automation.

For Event Type, type zha_event. For the event data, you’ll enter either single, double, or hold to the command: line like the image below. Then paste in the device_ieee you just found.

Under Actions, just choose a device and whatever action you want it to perform.

And here’s the YAML if you’d rather just copy and paste this in.

alias: ThirdReality Button Turn off Office Lamp
description: ""
trigger:
  - platform: event
    event_type: zha_event
    event_data:
      command: single
      device_ieee: 28:2c:02:bf:gg:f4:18:bd
condition: []
action:
  - type: turn_off
    device_id: 42339175b3f1e7c9481a8d3244c90d73
    entity_id: switch.office_smart_plug_switch
    domain: switch
mode: single

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Use Trigger ID’s to Create 1 Automation for all 3 Presses

If you haven’t used trigger ID’s in your automations, you really should be! I have a guide on how to use trigger ID’s here. But basically they will allow you to combine all 3 button presses into a single automation, with each press doing something different.

For example:

• single press turns off my lamp
• double press turns on my Bond Bridge ceiling fan
• Hold turns on my 3D printed nanoleaf wled panels

To add a trigger id, add the event_type like I showed you above. Click the 3 dots next to the trigger. Click Edit ID and give it a useful name like single-press.

Then add 2 more triggers by clicking the + Add Trigger button. Make sure to change out the Command: in the event data to either double or hold.

It should look like this:

Then, scroll down to the Actions section. If you have an action already (you’d only have one if you created the single automation like I did above), delete it.

Add a new action. Choose Choose. Under Conditions, click Add Condition > triggered by.

Click single-press.

Under Actions, pick a device and what you want to happen.

Then click Add Option and perform this two more times; one for double and another option for hold.

And for those of you that want the YAML, here you go. All you’d need to do is copy and paste this into a new automation, replace the device ieee, and choose your own entities.

alias: ThirdReality Button Turn off Office Lamp
description: ""
trigger:
  - platform: event
    event_type: zha_event
    event_data:
      command: single
      device_ieee: 28:2c:02:bf:ff:e3:78:bd
    id: single-press
  - platform: event
    event_type: zha_event
    event_data:
      command: double
      device_ieee: 28:2c:02:bf:ff:e3:78:bd
    id: double-press
  - platform: event
    event_type: zha_event
    event_data:
      command: hold
      device_ieee: 28:2c:02:bf:ff:e3:78:bd
    id: hold
condition: []
action:
  - choose:
      - conditions:
          - condition: trigger
            id: single-press
        sequence:
          - type: turn_on
            device_id: 32337175b3f1e7c9481a8d3244c90d73
            entity_id: switch.office_smart_plug_switch
            domain: switch
      - conditions:
          - condition: trigger
            id: double-press
        sequence:
          - type: toggle
            device_id: 28a975c3ccedf7fe48dd582f24aafc22
            entity_id: light.office_nanoleaf
            domain: light
      - conditions:
          - condition: trigger
            id: hold
        sequence:
          - type: turn_on
            device_id: cj83a906nb460b83852093127133a9f8
            entity_id: fan.master_ceiling_fan
            domain: fan
mode: single

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Wrapping Up

Hopefully this guide helped you integrate your Third Reality smart buttons into Home Assistant. They really are pretty good buttons. If you’d like to purchase a few yourself, here’s the Amazon link.