I have in front of me the new TX Ultimate Smart Touch Wall Switch from Sonoff as well as the equally impressive dark replacement cover.
This recent trend worries me a little, the packaging on this wallswitch is just stunning – but are we paying for the aesthetics – Sonoff started off producing an incredibly cheap and reliable mains controller, then better versions, then dual and quad controllers and then added cloud-control and – well, you just need to search through my blog or the Sonoff site to see what they’ve done – LOTS (original article April 15, 2023 – updated June 2023 – see update at the end)
They even had a go at smart lamps at one time – not their finest hour – but most of their products have been very successful. This new wall switch claims “Remote Control, Voice Control, Smart Scene, Ambient Lighting mode, Touch Vibration, Light Effects.”
The TX Ultimate (well, mine anyway) is a 2-gang WiFi smart switch and so there are two touch-areas – left and right. And yes the switch DOES look better IMHO with the black sparkly front rather than the default white. Up to now, nothing on the front seems to light up – just the frame – which looks wonderful. I hooked up the eWeLink APP, used the Bluetooth ADD option to add in the switch – no reset button of course so I just held onto one of the sections until I saw a single blue light at which point the APP asked me which WiFi access point to use. I chose the nearest and that was that.
I was immediately offered a firmware update which I accepted (must be update day today as I just updated my NSPANEL Pro devices to v1.7.0) and was greeted with firmware v1.1.0 for my device who’s default name is T5-2C-86 (that won’t last long… “pretty-wall-switch” makes more sense).
and now – the lighting…
Power-up state can be set (in eWeLink APP settings) to on, off or the last state – handy for power failures. You can also set a delay before changing state after a power failure. In the case of my 2-pole switch I can set these and other values per pole.
So, back to the main eWeLink controls for the switch… on and off, obviously. The “ambient lighting” can be controlled in the APP – you simply get a blue light area below each section to show on/off state. Ambient modes include night light, party, leisure, colour, childhood,wiper, fairy and starburst. “Color” is nice – it’s a simple soft colour fade as you might expect of many modern LED strip controllers. “Leisure” might make you think a police car has arrived.
The standard white cover easily clips off and can be replaced with the alternative…
Note – the dark colour does show greasy fingerprints but looks easy to clean, otherwise the whole thing is of high quality.
You also have timers and loop timers – at the end of the day this is a dual light switch with benefits – how useful it is will be largely down to cost. I’d like to kit out the entire house – but of course I have the problem here in Spain that many BRITS will have – no NEUTRAL to the wall switch and this device needs both incoming live and neutral. Note that there is only one neutral connector.
There are other variations of the device – including a 3-pole unit – also when you’re using the ambient lighting for effect, there’s another way of telling if the output is switching on or off – a rather pleasant 2-tone sequence for off and a longer, equally pleasant sequence for on.
As the lighting modes are independent of the actual on-off functions, using the APP will make it easy to program sequences for parties or just having guests over. I have no doubt that when the eWeLink nodes for Node-Red catch up, it will be easy to integrate this into a non-eWeLink IOT environment. Personally I like everything to be controllable by the device-independent MQTT protocol.
I can feel a hole in my bedside cabinet coming on.
Update June 2023 – The TX Ultimate 3-Way
And why am I writing this update? Well, for one thing I just received the 3-way version of tx-ultimate – and for another, I just realised that the default naming isn’t ideal for Alexa etc. So, I’ve renamed the device (firmware v1.1.0 when it arrived – latest version) to tx-ultimate-3 – see how that goes – the 3 channels are called channel1, channel2 and channel3 by default.. so I changed those in the APP to tx-ultimate-3-1, tx-ultimate-3-2 and tx-ultimate-3-3. I could have used “kitchen-light-1” etc but this’ll do for now.
I should clarify – the switch has 3 areas, one for each output – not 6 areas (ie on-off-one etc). So control by the switch is a toggle. Helps if you can see the light.
I did NO setup here beyond adding the TX-Ultimate to eWeLink – renaming it and renaming channel 1 for now. I simply said to ALEXA – “alexa turn on tx-ultimate-3-1” and it worked. “Alexa turn off tx-ultimate 3-1” – that worked. Then, pushing my luck (I have both an Echo DOT in my office and a Google Home Next unit (just like the DOT but IMHO better). “Hey Google turn on tx-ultimate-3-1” – that worked too – as did “hey google turn off tx-ultimate-3-1”.
I really do need to reduce Google’s responses to “OK” but other than that – just fine – doesn’t get any easier. For ECHO, the renaming does make all the difference -but of course as usual – Alexa had to let me down in the end when I got lazy… no fault of Sonoff – Echo does this a lot…
“Hey Google – tx-ultimate-3-1 on” – no problem. “Alexa tx-ultimate-3-1-off” – “not sure about that” said Alexa.
Of course you can also turn the devices on and off in the APP.
When you turn the lights on and off – you have a choice of sound effects and colour lighting effects (inc brilliance) – all very impressive. Shame they didn’t think to change the effects on a per-output basis (unless I’m missing something and I’m going to ask Sonoff anyway – if it’s not a feature, it should be IMHO).