Hubitat Virtual Button Workaround

[josh]

Update: There’s now a Hubitat Virtual Button custom tile available to more easily integrate HE virtual button devices into your dashboards.

@Shane_Adrian

I have Buttons set up in Hubitat when button 1 is pressed on a button, blinds Close. When 2 is pressed, blinds open. When 3 is pressed, some open, etc etc.

What’s driving those automations? Do you have a Rule Machine rule setup that is reacting to the Virtual Button presses?

Hubitat Virtual Button Approaches

The reason I ask is there’s a few different approaches you could take depending on how the virtual button is being used:

@josh

There are several different approaches you can take:

1. Change to a Virtual Switch and enable the ‘Auto Off’ setting
2. Change to a Custom Virtual Momentary Button driver
3. Use a SharpTools Rule to send the push() command to your button or run the actions directly
4. Use a Super Tile - you can use commands like push() directly as an action

Using a SharpTools Rule to send the push() command along with your desired button number could work here.

Or if Rule Machine is reacting to the virtual button presses, even calling the Hubitat Rule Machine rule directly with a ‘Cloud End Point’ added to the rule trigger could work.

Why no Virtual Button Tile?

@Shane_Adrian

Is there an issue with creating a button drive in Sharptools? Seems like a reasonable request?

Industry standard “Button” devices are supported since buttons are primarily devices that you physically actuate on a remote and the smart home platform or automation platform listens for those events and reacts to them in rules and such.

Hubitat’s Virtual Buttons are a bit of a bespoke implementation especially when they already have the Momentary capability which could have better covered this (and is also supported as a tile type).

There’s a feature request for Hubitat Virtual Buttons, but it never picked up much interest from the community, perhaps in part because there are a few different workarounds (more on that below), so other highly voted requests have been prioritized.

More background on buttons / virtual buttons / momentary here:

@josh

Buttons in Hubitat are a bit of a quirky thing.

Buttons are supposed to be more like sensors in that they should not define any commands (reference)… they are only supposed to report which button was physically pressed. So from a tile perspective, it didn’t make a lot of sense to create a tile specific to Hubitat’s Button implementation when it would only show the ID of the last button that was pressed. And for a single button device, that would always just show “1” which isn’t particularly helpful.

On the other hand, the Momentary capability exposes a single command called push()… but ironically there is no built-in Virtual Momentary device!

The most common approach is to use a Virtual Switch with the preference set to Auto Turn Off so it acts like momentary switch.