Tasmota / Sonoff - two way light switch controls

One small thing I wanted to do is make one Sonoff light switch work another - a simple two may light switch arrangement, such as top and bottom of stairs, etc.

Obviously, one can use a home automation server like home-assistant, but I am trying to keep it a bit simpler at the moment. I have an MQTT broker (actually on a Pi) and that allows any of the MQTT devices I have to talk to each other. Some devices, like my door entry, and alarm system have a means to send a series of MQTT messages on various events already.

It seems Tasmota / Sonoff can do what I want, but there were a couple of challenges, and reading some blogs I see I am not alone. So here is what I found and what is a gotcha or two.

The set up

What I was trying to do was have a light switch that controlled another - a simple two-way light switch arrangement (which is what it used to be). Either light switch ("button") when pressed would toggle the light, simple. I had another case where I wanted one button to control 4 lights, but we'll come to that later.

ButtonTopic

The simple answer is to set the ButtonTopic on the extra switch and tell it that the topic to use is the first switches. This should just work. But...

• You cannot set the ButtonTopic if you are sending a group message, which it thinks you are if the name of the GroupTopic is a substring of the Topic of the device, which is just silly. The result is a status saying ButtonTopic is still "0". No error, just confusing. I had to read the code to find this. I had Bed1LS as a GroupTopic and Bed1LS3 as the device Topic. As a result I could not set the ButtonTopic to anything!
• I don't think you can use the ButtonTopic if it is set to the same as the device GroupTopic (from looking at the code). So even changing GroupTopic and changing back to set ButtonTopic would not work in the above case. I am not totally sure why, unless it creates some sort of loop, but I cannot see why it would and it would be better to fix that than to silently ignore it.
• You can only set a system wide ButtonTopic, not a topic for each button if you have several buttons. This is OK on a simple button switch, obviously.
• You set the ButtonTopic just to the name, without the cmnd/ prefix or /Power suffix. It adds those - which was not obvious.
• Note, ButtonTopic replaces the normal relay operation unless MQTT is not available.

Request: Please can we have a ButtonTopic1/2/etc for each button?

Request: Can we please avoid the loop or whatever stops use of the GroupTopic as ButtonTopic?

Request: Why is grpflg set using strstr hence meaning it is set when talking to a device where group is subset of device topic. I can see group being subset of device as quite common?

Rules

Rules are another good way to do things and are mode flexible. You can make a rule so that pressing the button publishes on MQTT. You can have more than one sequence on a rule.

You simply send something like :-

 cmnd/Bed1LS3/Rule1 on Button1#state do publish cmnd/Bed1LS/Power1 TOGGLE endon

And you can add a second part to the rule, e.g.

 cmnd/Bed1LS3/Rule1 +on Button1#state do publish cmnd/Bed1LS/Power2 TOGGLE endon

I had to add two parts because the lights switches where double, and so needs Power1 and Power2 set.

• It looks like the Rule and ButtonTopic do not work together which is odd.
• I could not publish a command with spaces in it, such as Backlog (to change both Power1 and Power2 together). Maybe there is a trick to that. Hence I had two parts to the rule.
• Note, a rule on ButtonX replaces normal relay operation. A rule on PowerX happens when power changes which could be because of normal button control of power. You can test Power1#state=0 and Power1#state=1 if you don't want to use TOGGLE.

Request: Can we have it so Power (rather than Power1 or Power2) applies to all power controls so that one message could toggle or control all lights on a multiple button light switch?

Request: Can we publish something with spaces in somehow?

However, end result is good :-)

P.S. You cannot turn off the relay/button LEDs on the T1 (light switches) sadly.

Update: You can use Backlog in the command, which works well. E.g.
cmnd/GardenLS0/Rule1 on Button1#state do Backlog Publish cmnd/GardenLS1/Power 2;Delay 2;Publish cmnd/GardenLS2/Power 2;Delay 2;Publish cmnd/GardenLS3/Power 2;Delay 2;Publish cmnd/GardenLS4/Power 2;Delay 2;Publish cmnd/GardenLS5/Power 2;Delay 2;Publish cmnd/GardenLS6/Power 2; endon

Update: Be careful with now code and settings. I turned on Home Assistant Discovery and it changed the topics. I turned on WiFi signal scanning and somehow managed to put most of the sonoffs in a mode where they could not connect to the WiFi so went in to an AP mode for 3 minutes and tried again. It meant all my devices vanished and did not come back for quite a while. Several devices even somehow went in to a mode where they acted like the original SonOff code. I had to actually unscrew 4 of them and refresh, and two of those I had to erase the flash with a separate binary. The other two I had to sent a command over serial to Reset the config. So top tip: Always have one separate unit on which to test any changes first.