There are intelligent devices such as the Moes Fingerbot, a smart button that, at first glance, looks like a simple gadget, but is in fact very useful in a variety of contexts.
Why has Fingerbot Moes Zigbee have this prize?
The Moes Fingerbot features Zigbee technology, an included battery and accessories to adapt to any switch or button.
Advantages and disadvantages of the Moes Zigbee Fingerbot
Benefits
- Zigbee technology: By communicating with Zigbee technology, you can control your Moes Fingerbot anywhere in the world on your phone (thanks to a compatible Zigbee home automation hub) and you can benefit from the signal repetition of other Zigbee devices to have sufficient communication range.
- Compatible with Tuya and Zigbee2MQTT: This Moes Zigbee Fingerbot is compatible with the Tuya ecosystem and also with Zigbee2MQTT, which you can use with Home Assistant or Jeedom.
- Customisable: Thanks to its accessories and different settings, you can use this Moes Fingerbot with a wide variety of buttons and switches.
- Physical button: You always have local control of your Moes Fingerbot thanks to its physical button.
- No electrical wiring: If you want to control the lights, blinds, pool cleaner or any other device from your phone, you don’t need to do any electrical wiring, just stick this Moes Fingerbot onto your traditional switch or knob.
Disadvantages
- You need a Zigbee home automation hub: To use your Moes Zigbee Fingerbot, you need a compatible Zigbee home automation hub.
- Space: Unlike a Zigbee module, which is usually installed behind a wall switch, the Fingerbot is installed above the switch or button, which takes up space.
Tutorial on the Zigbee Fingerbot ZS-FB-V3-MS
Today we’re going to take a look at a real-life use case for this Moes Fingerbot in an office, although this device can be used in many different contexts for your home.
Let’s find out more about the Moes Fingerbot.
Description of the Moes Fingerbot
The Fingerbot is an intelligent button that simulates your finger, meaning that anything you would press with your finger in everyday life can be replaced by this button.
And you may be wondering: is it really useful? I’m going to tell you about a use case in the office where I work.
Because we’re a home automation e-commerce business (where, incidentally, you can discover a wide range of smart appliances at attractive prices and with worldwide delivery), we receive parcels every morning and deliver our customers’ orders every evening.
In the mornings, we often receive several carriers when we’re working in the office, so we have to open the building’s electric gate frequently.
When a carrier arrives, they make a call and we open the door from the telephone.
But we have sometimes encountered technical problems.
We also have a radio frequency remote control to open this gate, but the signal is poor, so it’s difficult to open it from inside the office.
This is where the Fingerbot really comes into its own.
I placed a smart camera from the Tuya ecosystem in front of the electric gate, inside the office, with a window in front of which you can see the arrival of a transporter.
This camera is compatible with Amazon Alexa, so I took the opportunity to get the image from this camera with Alexa voice assistants with screens, such as the Echo Show.
And also an Echo Hub.
Now that I can see when a carrier arrives while I’m working, I want to open it without having to make calls or use the remote control while scrolling through messages.
So I placed this control in front of the electric gate, inside the office, and because it’s as close as possible, it has excellent communication.
And that’s where the magic happens. On top of this controller, I’ve placed the Moes Fingerbot.
This means you can open the electric gate using Amazon Alexa voice assistants.
To do this, I connected this Zigbee Fingerbot to Jeedom and the Zigbee2mqtt platform, as we’ll see below, and the process is similar with Home Assistant and also with a Tuya hub.
And because I’ve linked Jeedom to Alexa, as we’ve seen in other content, I have voice control of this Moes Fingerbot, with an old Echo Dot I’ve had since 2014 in the office.
And an Echo that I installed in our order picking area.
So, in the morning, while we’re in the office, whoever says “Alexa, open the electric gate”.
It opens the electric gate when the Fingerbot presses the remote control that controls it.
With Jeedom, I also have a direct link to the electric gate opening action in my favourites tab in Google Chrome; if I don’t want to disturb my colleagues, I can open the electric gate simply by clicking on the link.
In the afternoon, instead of going back and forth in the office to open the electric gate, I now open the electric gate by voice while preparing the orders, without interruption.
Incidentally: before arriving at this method, I tested the possibility of integrating the remote control that opens the electric gate into Jeedom using a device called Rfplayer, which replicates remote control commands.
As this controller uses a function called Rolling Code (i.e. it changes code so that no-one can reproduce the commands, which offers greater security), I wasn’t able to use this controller directly without using a Fingerbot.
General characteristics of the Moes Zigbee Fingerbot
In terms of general characteristics, this Moes Fingerbot is white in colour, measures 34.5×34.5×34.5 mm and weighs 38 grams.
This device has a ‘decoupling torque’ of 2 kgf-cm (kilogram-force per centimetre) which indicates the maximum force it can exert to operate a button or switch before it ‘decouples’ (i.e. before it can no longer push).
In other words, the Fingerbot can apply a force of 2 kilograms at a distance of 1 cm from the motor’s centre of rotation.
This is usually sufficient for most standard switches and knobs, but in the case of more robust knobs, I recommend checking this feature to ensure that it will be powerful enough.
Another feature is the 12mm ‘maximum arm movement’, which indicates the maximum distance the Fingerbot’s arm can travel when pressing a button or switch. This means that the arm can move up to 12 millimetres forward, allowing it to travel a short distance to activate buttons.
In this case, depending on the depth of the switch or button you want to operate, this 12 mm of movement may be sufficient for most standard buttons, but you need to check whether this corresponds to your needs, particularly if the button is deeper.
Speaking of buttons and switches, with this Moes Fingerbot you get accessories to adapt your device to different types of buttons or switches, such as adhesive tips for a better grip on buttons or switches, pull arms for pulling switches or handles, adapters for toggle switches by making a lever movement instead of a simple push.
These accessories increase the Fingerbot’s versatility, allowing you to control a wide variety of devices in your home, depending on the shape and ergonomics of the buttons you need to operate.
To control your Fingerbot from anywhere in the world on your phone, it works with Zigbee wireless technology, so you need a compatible Zigbee home automation hub.
You can use a Zigbee hub from the Tuya ecosystem, such as the Silvercrest brand, which you can find in Lidl shops.
Or any other Tuya Zigbee home automation hub you can find in online shops, such as a home automation hub from the same company, Moes.
This button is compatible with Amazon Alexa and Google Home voice assistants if you have first linked it to your Zigbee home automation hub and connected the hub to your voice assistants.
The battery is powered by a CR2 battery included in the packaging.
We also have stickers for attaching the Fingerbot to a surface.
We also have an instruction manual for all the technical details concerning this appliance.
If we look at the top of the Fingerbot, we have a physical button, a criterion that I think is essential in a smart home, that of always being able to have local control of a device without having to take out your phone.
We can see the accessory that will be able to move up and down to simulate the pressure of our finger on a button or switch.
On the back is the plate containing the battery that powers the Fingerbot and the button for connecting it to a compatible Zigbee home automation hub.
How do I connect the Moes Fingerbot to a Zigbee home automation hub?
Let’s look at how to connect this Zigbee Fingerbot to a compatible Zigbee home automation hub.
Linking ZS-FB-V3-MS to Smart Life
If you’re using a Tuya hub, from the Smart Life application you need to click on add a new device.
You can then add your Fingerbot.
To do this, remove the battery cover and press the association button on the device for more than 5 seconds, until the LED indicator starts to flash.
Now your Fingerbot is available in the Smart Life application.
How to link ZS-FB-V3-MS with Zigbee2Mqtt
In Zigbee2mqtt, which you can use with Home Assistant or Jeedom, the process is similar: you need to launch include mode.
You need to remove the battery cover and press the association button on the device for more than 5 seconds, until the LED indicator starts flashing.
You now have your Fingerbot available on Zigbee2MQTT.
How to install this Zigbee Fingerbot
Installing the Fingerbot is very simple; you can place a 3M sticker on the bottom of the device and, at this point, attach it to your switch or button, taking care to position it correctly so that it can press your button or switch correctly.
What’s interesting is that you can change the battery without having to dismantle the installed device.
In my case, I also glued the button that controls the electric gate with a 3M sticker to prevent it from moving when the Fingerbot is pressed.
This installation has been in place for a few months and is working perfectly.
Detailed functions of the Moes Zigbee button
Now let’s discover all the functions of this Moes Zigbee fingerbot.
How to use the ZS-FB-V3-MS with Smart Life
In Smart Life, we have access to various options for our Zigbee Fingerbot. To start with, in the top right-hand corner, we have the battery status.
In the middle, we have two options for immediately activating the Fingerbot by pressing both the Fingerbot icon and the activation button just below it.
If we go to “Movement Settings”, we can see an option called “Mode”, which allows us to define different operating modes called “Click”, “Switch” and “Program” for this Fingerbot, such as, for example, a percentage of downstroke.
The time it remains in this state, which can be very useful, for example, when you have to hold down a button on a switch to open a blind completely, and you can also define a percentage for the button to rise if you don’t want it to rise completely.
Other options, such as ‘Touch Control’, enable or disable the physical touch of the device by a user.
The “Reverse switch” option allows you to reverse the direction of movement of the device’s arm, i.e. the Fingerbot will move in the opposite direction to normal, which is useful for certain configurations or types of switch that require a pulling rather than pushing movement, or if you need the device to retract the arm rather than extend it.
This function is useful if the Fingerbot is configured to operate toggle switches or handles that need to be pulled rather than pressed, offering greater versatility of use with different types of buttons and switches.
You can also program different actions with this Fingerbot, which is very interesting in certain automation contexts.
Then there’s the ‘Schedule’ option which, as the name suggests, allows you to create Fingerbot activation schedules, either with a countdown timer or with a calendar showing the days and times of activation.
In the “Advanced settings” section, there are options for adjusting the force exerted by the device when pressing a button or switch, to adapt to the environment if it requires more pressure to operate.
And “Product Manual” takes us straight to the device’s user manual.
How to use ZS-FB-V3-MS with Zigbee2mqtt
In Zigbee2MQTT, we also have access to various options. The “State” option enables the button to be pressed.
The ‘Battery’ section, as its name suggests, displays the current state of the device’s battery, from 0 to 100%.
“Mode” allows you to define different operating modes for this Fingerbot, as we saw earlier, by being able to set a percentage of ascent and descent and a time for which the Fingerbot remains pressed.
We also have the ‘Reverse’ option which, as we saw earlier, reverses the use of the Fingerbot for specific use cases where a device needs to be pulled rather than pressed.
“Touch” allows you to activate or deactivate the Fingerbot using its physical button.
And “Link Quality” gives us the quality of the Zigbee communication with our home automation hub and this Moes Fingerbot.
In my personal case, as I mentioned, I connected this Zigbee Fingerbot to the Jeedom home automation hub and the Zigbee2MQTT platform.
As the office is large, I strengthened the communication signal between the Jeedom home hub and the Moes Fingerbot with a Smlight Zigbee dongle, which, as I’ve discussed in other content, can be used as a signal repeater, so I installed it halfway between the Jeedom home hub and the Moes Fingerbot to help with reliable communications.
Please note that this dongle is compatible with Home Assistant and Jeedom, but not with a Tuya hub. If you want to find out more about Zigbee compatibility, I recommend that you visit my affiliate shop on pluyu.com, which has some very useful compatibility filters.
Of course, the magic of a smart home is the ability to create different automations based on defined criteria.
For example, you can decide that this Moes Fingerbot will be activated every day at a specific time, as in the case of a smart home user who activates his pool cleaner using this device.
Your imagination is your limit.
In short, this Moes Fingerbot is an ally for your home because it will make your life easier in many cases, without having to carry out any electrical wiring work or change any electrical appliances. You’ll be able to upgrade your device in just a few minutes and control it from anywhere in the world.
