Just bought a second one of these and wanted to share this with you guys. I put it in the general discussion forum because people who might not otherwise be interested in remotes might be interested in this for the price.
Since we have the Vera and Android/iOS apps… What do you use this for?
Good question Aaron. I have the android and iPad apps, but I wanted a remote to use when the phones or pads weren’t available or being charged, etc. At that price, the remote is cheap!
Thanks for the heads-up. I just ordered 2. Great for “night off” scenes where I don’t want/can’t run my Iphone app.
But they’re not such a good buy if they don’t work. See my thread on 45600 strangeness here (sorry, couldn’t figure how to create a link). Very odd stuff…
Bob (beachboync)
For $3.00 I am not going to lose sleep if it doesn’t work! The risk/reward potential is too great.
I am making some progress on my 45600 remote problem, and have sent in a support request to MCV.
It looks like triggers assigned to the remote switches never go away. You can delete the device, delete scenes, etc. and the phantom switch remains. You can add a trigger for that switch, but then both will run.
I will keep all y’all posted if I hear something. In the mean time, I have worked around the problem by finding a mapping of keys to my scenes that (mostly) does what I want.
Bob (beachboync)
Side note about what to use these for. . . DIY projects and hacking.
I bought a couple and the first one is tagged for monitoring my porch windows. On my porch, I set up momentary switches that will be pressed when a window is opened or closed. Each switch is wired to a button input on the remote’s circuit board allowing my Vera to monitor the windows.
It’s substantially cheaper than buying 6 battery powered window sensors. It was about $10 for 6 windows using my setup. Using the sensors available on amazon would run over $200 and require more battery maintenance.
That said, I am interested in hearing what Bob (beachboync) finds out. Looks like it could pose problems.
As long as you set up the triggers once and don’t change them, you should be OK, I think! It is only when you try to redefine things that I found the old ones don’t go away.
Nothing from MCV yet…
Bob (beachboync)
Which momentary switches do you use on your windows? Do you have to drill a small hole to mount them in between the wall and the window?
A link to the switches is below.
Drilling is a good solution if the channel for you window is too shallow to accommodate the switch. I didn’t need to in my situation, I have sliding glass windows that run along a rail. There’s enough depth next to the rail for the button to sit without being pressed by the window. By adding a small bead of epoxy to the bottom of the window, I was able to get the button to be pushed whenever the bead passes it. I also coated the button’s contacts in epoxy to avoid a short since the rail is aluminum.
I haven’t gotten everything set up yet, but by toggling the “window state” any time the button signal is received, Vera should be able to report whether it’s open or closed. If that doesn’t work, I’ll add a second button and the order of the button signals will indicate whether the window was opened or close.
I’ve also considered drilling a small hole in the deadbolt receptacle and putting a button in there to sense if the door’s locked or unlocked. I eventually want full z-wave locks so I don’t know if it’s worthwhile.
I also used one of these buttons to detect when my garage is closed by wiring it to a Schlage window sensor. The window sensor is tripped when the button isn’t pressed. So they’re pretty versatile.
@MarkBlanch, you might want to look at sources other than Amazon that are a bit less expensive for small electronic parts. I typically order my switches from here:
http://www.taydaelectronics.com/electromechanical/switches-key-pad/tact-switch.html
I’m just addicted to their one-click-buy and 2 day delivery. It’s really bad. Haha
[shadow=red,left]As long as you set up the triggers once and don’t change them, you should be OK, I think! It is only when you try to redefine things that I found the old ones don’t go away.[/shadow]
This is the same thing I found too. I had 2 remote and only programmed scenes for buttons 1-9 on both remotes. Then I bought 5 more remotes at that nice price and changed a few buttons and added scenes for buttons 10-18 and included all 7 remotes with the same scenes. (long tedious process).
What I found is that buttons 10-18 work without any problems.
Button 9 only turns on 9
Button 8 turns on 8 and 5
Button 7 turns on 7 and 8
Button 6 turns on 6 and 3
Button 5 turns on 5 and 2
Button 4 turns on 4 and 1
Button 3 turns on 3 and 2
Button 2 turns on 2 and 1
Button 1 only turns on 1
I called MCV tech support today and they remoted into my system and were stumped. The tech support person had me submit a tech support ticket. I hope they get this solved sometime soon. The remotes are a great deal @ $2.95. They did go up to $3.95 recently.
Percentage wise the price is skyrocketing. haha. Still a good deal for DIY projects though.
Let me know if anything interesting comes out of your MCV ticket. My free time has been high-jacked to complete some other projects for my lady friend and I haven’t been able to work on this as much as I would have liked.
-Mackenzie
;D Must be new support folks then. But do point them to things like this, bug #2083 and bug #2281, that sound similar.
I use one of these on our bedroom lights. My MCV3 should arrive tomorrow and I’m PUMPED 
George Diaconescu with tech support emailed me back and said he looked at my logs and vera only shows the one scene coming on. Really 2 scenes activate with only one button selected. The back 18 scenes have only been programmed to what they are set to now and there is not a problem with them. Only the front 9 scenes that I had set differently the first time I programmed the remote.
@oTi Would you think deleting the scene from vera and making a new scene and then programming the remote would work? Once I set the remotes I do not plan on changing it again. The first time I programmed the remotes was just to see how they worked. They worked great with the very first programming. The problem came about when I changed the programming.
This thing is cheap the same way Linux is free. Only if your time is worthless. I have one of these I got on a previous deal. It’s still in my closet (far away from all my other unused HA gear) still in the package. If anyone wants one “free” + the cost of shipping let me know.
I was away for a while, and the guy I was working with at MCV support was also away, so we haven’t gotten together again.
But I tried a new test this morning and basically just a lot of craziness happens. Things don’t work right when using the 45600 and results are inconsistent and unexplainable. I will continue the technical discussion in my other thread, but just wanted to let you know all is still messed up, and I am still pursuing it.
Bob (beachboync)