Home Assistant (HA) Philips Hue Dimmer Remote Button Hold Feature

If you're a Home Assistant user and control your lights, it's possible you've added one (or a few) Philips Hue Dimmer remotes, models RWL020 (US) or RWL021 (EU). Over the past few years I've controlled my Hue bulbs (after a factory reset thanks to hue-thief) directly with my HUSBZB-1 USB Zigbee/Z-Wave radio, foregoing any extra Hue hub hardware/integrations. One issue I've had for years, however, is that my Hue remotes had single button-press functionality for the On, Dim Up, Dim Down, and Off buttons. This is great for simple setups, but not having a 'Hold' event for each button means that I am missing out on effectively doubling my remote's functionality, including repurposing each button for a different set of lights. That was, until today :)

If you're like me, you may have been running HA for years now and have paired Zigbee devices long ago. It was only after reviewing a recent HA Blueprint submission that it occurred to me that there was at least some disparity in the zha_event meta data that was being set from my existing remote configuration versus that of the Blueprint's author. The big difference? They have a Hold functionality enabled for their Hue remotes!

I had three older Hue remotes and one I just acquired a few weeks back -- same model number, design, firmware (according to HA Zigbee integration panel), and Zigbee Signature details. However, I had never tried my new remote with zha_event and turns it out that it was showing the extra button meta data after all.

After spamming a few threads and looking into other results online, I was told this functionality should be provided already by ZHA Quirks. Guessing this was not about firmware anymore after some Q&A, I simply performed a proper 'Remove' operation from the HA Zigbee integration panel, used a paperclip to press the 'Setup' button on the back of one of my older Hue Dimmer remotes, and upon it being re-added, I was now seeing the additional meta data in zha_event! I performed the same task on my last two remotes and both also worked fine. According to a poster on one of the threads I was inquiring within, this functionality should work out of the box no matter when the device was added to HA. I am unclear why that's not the case, but perhaps it's more valuable just to know this for long-time HA users that may have paired these devices years back and would never re-pair without an issue to cause them to do so.

I'm now controlling two light groups - one group uses the normal button press while the other uses the hold equivalent on each. Hopefully this post helps someone out there searching around for a similar desire.