Smart Home Automation

[Badaboom]

I did. I bought one last week off of Amazon. I had actually linked it up with the Globe Electric app and it was running the latest firmware. So this one should be easy to deal with.

I am finding one issue on color though. On loss of power (switch turned off), it does not return to the same color that it was running before loss of power.

If I ask Alexa to turn it to soft white, this is what I get (between soft white, warm white, and daylight, the voice controls for whites are pretty good)

"POWER":"ON","Dimmer":100,"Color":"000000609F","HSBColor":"0,0,0","White":100,"CT":370,"Channel":[0,0,0,38,62],"Scheme":0,"Fade":"OFF","Speed":1,"LedTable":"ON"

If I turn the switch off and then back on, it comes back as this

"POWER":"ON","Dimmer":100,"Color":"0000009AFF","HSBColor":"0,0,0","White":100,"CT":369,"Channel":[0,0,0,60,100],"Scheme":0,"Fade":"OFF","Speed":1,"LedTable":"ON"

That color is unpleasantly low K. It works out to (per smartthings) around 2300k, which is just not ok to look at. It's fixable just by issuing a voice command. It also only seems to happen on loss of power, which may be a non-issue if I wire them to always be hot (or bypass the smart switch relay).

 

[Drizzt321]

Hows the actual brightness? Care to share an Amazon link? I might buy one to give it a shot, and if it's sufficient for me I'll buy a whole bunch.

 

[Badaboom]

It's a 65W equivalent. Pretty bright. Certainly enough for general household lighting. Home Depot sells them too. Just search for Globe Electric 50079 (50078 for the 4" version).

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07XTS3V1C/re ... HFbJ0TKHSC

I think my color restore was a smartthings issue. I sort of have it fixed now, but I'm going to toy with it a little more to see if I can get the exact white I want.

 

[w00key]

I really prefer a well defined standard. All the Zigbee Lightlink stuff can be connected to a Hue bridge, or a USB stick / Home Assistant. Z-Wave is another big one.

The wifi ones are often hopeless security wise, while the ZLL/ZWave ones are relatively well protected (requires a reset / physical access to (re)pair).


You can also get a ton of accessories for ZLL, like random wall switches (from Busch Jaeger, Gira etc) that you can pair without going through a gateway and they all work well together.


As I posted before I got a bunch of IKEA Tradfri lamps, switches etc that speaks ZLL. If I ever get bored with the built in hub/app, I can script that myself in HA.


The problem with wifi is that everyone is reinventing the protocol on top of udp/tcp and be stupid about it. Nothing works together.

 

[ChaoticUnreal]

I really prefer a well defined standard. All the Zigbee Lightlink stuff can be connected to a Hue bridge, or a USB stick / Home Assistant. Z-Wave is another big one.

The wifi ones are often hopeless security wise, while the ZLL/ZWave ones are relatively well protected (requires a reset / physical access to (re)pair).


You can also get a ton of accessories for ZLL, like random wall switches (from Busch Jaeger, Gira etc) that you can pair without going through a gateway and they all work well together.


As I posted before I got a bunch of IKEA Tradfri lamps, switches etc that speaks ZLL. If I ever get bored with the built in hub/app, I can script that myself in HA.


The problem with wifi is that everyone is reinventing the protocol on top of udp/tcp and be stupid about it. Nothing works together.

So most of the no-name wifi lights switches are running Tuya which is a company that just rebrands things. They even have a site to order them. At one point there was a fairly easy process to flash custom firmware onto them. That was fixed and then recracked but I'm not sure of the current state of it (I haven't needed new things) That said I have 4 light bulbs and 7 switches that do not communicate outside of my network that I flashed with Tuya Convert they communicate with a local MQTT broker that I have running and then my HA picks them up from there.

Are they less secure than Z-wave/Zigbee yes. But I don't need to worry about someone hacking my whole network from them since they don't talk outside my network. So someone is either already on my network or my network is down (they fallback to broadcasting an AP if they can't connect to the designated network)

My personal usage is a mix of wifi bulbs/wifi plugs/zigbee bulbs/zigbee plug (mostly for range extension)/z-wave light switches

 

[w00key]

So deauth a light's wifi connection, connect to it's automatic AP, and exploit the super holey firmware to root and gain a persistent foothold? Every time a Wifi/TCP enabled whatever is tested it's rooted in no time.

I don't trust IoT-y things unless it uses a major standard - these standards are reasonable secure by default. Wifi IoT devices from the lowest bidder is how you get botnets at home - most of them are just an ESP8266/ESP32 duct taped onto an Arduino with tons of shortcuts taken while writing the software. Bluetooth is iffy too, but it can be protected with a physical pairing button or proximity enhanced pairing (needs to be very very close to pair, think few centimeters), or if you don't care about data security, like those BBQ thermometers broadcasting in the open without pairing.

Even my SensorPush thermometer requires pairing for security, over NFC, the app reads a burnt in random key to talk to this specific device over BLE that works at way longer distances.

 

[kperrier]

https://cloudfree.shop/

No affiliation with the site. Smart plugs and some other stuff pre-flashed with tasmota.

 

[w00key]

Wow, so you buy Tuya (or rebranded), super insecure stuff that can be exploited OTA and rewrite the firmware to an open source ROM like Tasmota? That sounds like a lot of work for a light bulb / smart plug but hey, everything except a single brand Hue / IKEA Tradfri setup is a lot of work to be honest. Just don't leave them on the default ROM.

 

[Drizzt321]

Yes, we prefer IoT which can be locally exploited to overwrite it with decently written firmware which is secure, but lets us customize usage/integrations as we prefer. Including local only stuff, rather than requiring cloud linked crapola.

 

[ChaoticUnreal]

Wow, so you buy Tuya (or rebranded), super insecure stuff that can be exploited OTA and rewrite the firmware to an open source ROM like Tasmota? That sounds like a lot of work for a light bulb / smart plug but hey, everything except a single brand Hue / IKEA Tradfri setup is a lot of work to be honest. Just don't leave them on the default ROM.

It might be some work (it's like 10 mins) but it's also half the cost for a tuya bulb compared to the first zwave one on Amazon probably 4x cheaper than hue/ikea bupbs

 

[Badaboom]

Honestly, I'd love something that isn't exposed via wifi, but the cost difference is huge. I can't find any zigbee downlights that work in a pre-existing can. The install time on that would be in the 10-15 minutes per bulb on top of pairing time. My options appear to be Hue or something cheapo. Hue, for my installation, would be $934. The bulbs I'm flashing myself are $371. I can't find anything that is RGBWW and available in a downlight that fits a retrofit setup that isn't one of these two options. If there's something else, then I'm down.

I'll probably buy 20 of these. Pre-flash them all, and put 3 back in the box for when some of them burn out.

 

[Drizzt321]

So I'm exchanging emails with Novostella via their Contact Us page, trying to see if they'd do a run of their 13W bulbs with Tasmota installed by default. Trying to get them to understand it. We'll see, maybe they'd be willing to do it for enough people. I wouldn't be surprised if I could find enough people to fill 200-300 bulbs, although that might be too small for them. But who knows, I know a few good spots to advertise arranging a group by, and https://cloudfree.shop/ which kperrier mentioned earlier might even be willing to be the point person, since he has more experience with fulfillment/payment processing than I. Probably also has the legal entity setup as well.

 

[w00key]

I actually haven't seen anything cheaper than Tradfri for plain dimmable bulbs. I use the GU10/warm white, €7 in most places, some GU10/white spectrum, €13, and a bunch of E14, white spectrum, €13.

The great thing about Tradfri is that the plain warm white bulbs have great color rendering index of 90+, that used to be exclusive to fancy / specialty bulbs like Philips Master LedSpot ExpertColor ($$$), but now it's in every non spectrum Tradfri and also their non smart line, the Ledare. I don't have any RGB leds, but those are €25 each if you want them. I prefer a very nice white bulb over random colors.


I guess downlights have an interesting fitting or are including the armature? Yeah, then it gets expensive quickly. But the standard e14/27/gu10 fittings have cheap Zigbee bulbs available.


My next lighting project is to use a Tradfri 24V PSU to drive non IKEA leds. It's priced nicely, €25 for 30W (noname 24V/1.5A wall plug style adapter is €17), speaks ZLL and is well built and CE rated unlike some AliExpress specials. It outputs just a standard 24V PWM signal compatible with all 24V led strips but the actual placement / wood work / how to hide it well is the hard part.

 

[Drizzt321]

It's not basic white bulbs that cost too much, it's when you want RGB WITH the Warm White + Cold White to give you all the colors + all the color temperatures.

 

[Badaboom]

Yeah, that's where we kind of fell off. There were plenty of zigbee enabled white (temp selectable) downlights out there at ok prices. Honestly, I think I probably need to decide what I really need on this. I'd like some that are just white and some where I could play with colors, but if they're in the same room then I'm probably going to struggle to get different brands of lights to look the same. Still, if tasmota stuff is reasonably secure when segregated on your network, cost wise it's going to win out.

I've got some time to make the decision.

 

[w00key]

It's not basic white bulbs that cost too much, it's when you want RGB WITH the Warm White + Cold White to give you all the colors + all the color temperatures.

The white spectrum ones I have use 2 sets, 2200K for warm, 4000K for cold, and middle uses a mix of the two. Which kinda suck, mixing kills the CRI, but putting in 3 sets of LEDs in a single bulb is too expensive I guess.

But the RGB bulbs from IKEA have the different warm to cold whites by default, not sure if they added 2 sets of white or just do RGBW, W+R / W+B for the two extremes, but it's there, example: https://youtu.be/nwfVkja2pOU?t=293


But I'll just use the 2700K dimmable ones from now on, no need to pay more than €7 each when all I do with the WS one is putting them on 2700K with crapper CRI.

 

[Badaboom]

I ended up changing directions and going the more comfortable route. I picked up some Enbrighten/Jasco zigbee switches/dimmers to handle most of our basement lighting. The contractor ended up swapping out the trims to a temperature selectable trim, and at 4000k I'm happy with the color.

As a more entertaining/fun project I bought some RGBW light strips and mounted them on the back of our TV in the basement. I picked up the Zooz Zen31 Zigbee light controller to drive them. I had bought a cheaper wifi set, but I wasn't able to get it flashed with tasmota. My only annoyance is the elbow connectors that I bought. I had one that was slightly challenging to install, but I think I got a solid connection. I think I can see a slight difference in color from left to right along the strips. It's one of those things that only I'll notice.

Will grab some pictures this evening, but it's a nice add. My only real question now is how I can use it. Ideally I'd have it kick on whenever the TV turns on, but I'm struggling to make that work. The LG Thinq stuff sends an on/off state to Alexa, but I can't pull that into IFTTT from what I can tell. I'll need to toy with it a little more. I'm sure there's a workaround or something.

 

[Drizzt321]

So knowing nothing about using IFTTT or Alexa or integrating them, but https://www.vcloudinfo.com/2019/12/using-ifttt-with-alexa-routines-plus-home-assistant.html might have something useful? Or alternatively get a HDMI USB CEC device with a RPi Zero or something to detect when the TV turns on sense the "I'm On" CEC signal to activate the lighting.

 

[w00key]

I found a Zigbee (Hue, Ikea) 12-24V LED PWM dimmer, available in white, white spectrum, RGBW and RGB+white spectrum. High power too, up to 24V 15A, Tradfri's PSU doesn't like high power strips (10W/m x 3 meter is the max) and doesn't do anything but just white. I might just get one of them, just need to figure out how to wire it up and what LED strip to get.

 

[ChaoticUnreal]

I've recently purchased a string of these LED strings that I plan on turning into Christmas Tree lights (I'll buy more strings once proof of concept).

Current plans is to use use ESPHome to drive it and hook it into my HomeAssistant.

Also working on getting NFC tags working since they recently added support for those to the official HA apps.

 

[Drizzt321]

How are you going to use NFC tags?

 

[ChaoticUnreal]

How are you going to use NFC tags?

The only actual use case I can think of currently (long story short don't have as much smart lights/things as I'd like due to planning on moving) is on the washer/dryer to set a delayed notification on when they should end to the cell phone that scanned it.

But yeah I bought a bunch of stickers back when I started looking into tasker and never had a compelling use case for them so they have just been sitting on my desk.

I can think of a few places around my house that I might put some to control smart lights / switches where I don't have a physical switch because it would be slightly faster than opening the HA app. I'm not sure if I can have an NFC tag and scan it with a device that doesn't have HA on it allowing others to control smart lights without giving them full access to my HA so might see if that is possible.

 

[Drizzt321]

How are you going to use NFC tags?

The only actual use case I can think of currently (long story short don't have as much smart lights/things as I'd like due to planning on moving) is on the washer/dryer to set a delayed notification on when they should end to the cell phone that scanned it.

But yeah I bought a bunch of stickers back when I started looking into tasker and never had a compelling use case for them so they have just been sitting on my desk.

I can think of a few places around my house that I might put some to control smart lights / switches where I don't have a physical switch because it would be slightly faster than opening the HA app. I'm not sure if I can have an NFC tag and scan it with a device that doesn't have HA on it allowing others to control smart lights without giving them full access to my HA so might see if that is possible.

Well, an NFC can have a URL that auto-opens, so you could have an HA panel which has no login protection (I think) which could contain the lighting controls.

And I want to get some Z-Wave/Zigbee "put them anywhere" dimmer/on-off control switches once I get a lot more bulbs put in. Which will hopefully be in the next few months.

 

[Badaboom]

Got one of my dimmers installed over lunch, and it just reminds me how well the Zigbee compatible stuff works. Absolutely zero issues getting it fired up and going.

And the picture of the TV backlight. I think I've got a strip that isn't making a good connection in the bottom right corner. The circuit of lights goes from top center and then clockwise around the TV. There's more of a blue on the right side than the left. I didn't want to solder the strips, so I used crimp connectors (which never work well).

And I have access to all 123 Alexa enabled colors (presets built in).

Spoiler

 

[Drizzt321]

How does the TV back lighting work? Shouldn't it have a HDMI as well to see what overall scene is and do brightness/color to match?

 

[Badaboom]

That's a separate rabbit hole. I'm not jumping into that one right now. It's just single color at any given time. We set the color/brightness we want and leave it like that. I'm sensitive to eye strain, and looking at a bright screen in a dark room is unpleasant. This helps keep my eyes adjusted to some light without the potential for glare on the screen.

Also, it looks cool.

I've seen a handful of projects that transition the colors depending on what's on screen. They all seem to require passthrough HDMI or something similar. I'm not sure how that would work if we're using separate HDMI inputs (I'd need a switching box somewhere). When I do that, I lose some of the other features of the TV.

 

[Drizzt321]

Gotcha, that's what it seemed like. Although... I am using Kodi as my front-end, so I probably could end up doing something through that, eventually, maybe. Interesting idea, waaaaay low on my todo list.

 

[kperrier]

Also, it looks cool.

It does! That looks really nice, in that nook created by the built-ins.

 

[w00key]

I love the look of it, indirect lighting . Hmm, maybe I'll need to get something for behind the TV too, but I just read that RGB+W/+WS doesn't work well with the IKEA hub, they don't have such products yet so the app only does color or W/WS, not both. Arg.


For the kitchen, I got 2 meters of >90 CRI warm white 240 leds/meter 24V led strip, trimmed to 1.6 meter, at 28.8W/1800 lumens it should work with the default Tradfri driver. If I stand in front of the sink I block the spot right behind me, but this led strip illuminating the ceiling in front of the window should fix that.

For the living room I have 3 meters of 120 led/meter warm white leds, can't find CRI 90's with low enough wattage, 28.8W/2500 lumens total also shining at the ceiling attached to another Tradfri 30W driver.

Cost is about 60 euros each, 35 ish for the leds, 25 for the driver.


I think I totally overkilled it on the brightness, kitchen only had 1600 total for example, but we'll see, fortunately these are all dimmable.

 

[w00key]

#1 installed in the living room. First impression: huh, I thought it would be lighter, but okay, indirect light needs way more lumens. Second impression: is that... coil whine? Ugh, if hot glue / boxing it in doesn't fix it, apparently you can salvage the ICPSLC24-10NA module inside and hook up any 12 or 24V DC PSU. It is pretty quiet at < 30% and completely silent at full power, but it doesn't like the range in between, I see 1/2/5 khz peaks on an audio analyzer. Impression after dark: oh alright it's enough lol.

Unscientific measurement with a phone app: 2 lx with my old lights on full on the couch, 6 lx on 10%, 11 lx on 30%, and 72 lx on full brightness, and 100 when tilting the phone towards the back / where the light comes from.


#2 pending design / drawing / probably some aluminium L-profile, it's in a tricky spot and I want to make the most of it and not have half of the light blocked immediately.


[edit] Forgot about this: these Epistar HQ 3528 SMD (standard) / Epistar SMD 2216 HQ (high CRI) LED strips aren't as nice as Osram Parathom / Philips ExpertColor / IKEA Tradfri 2700K's. Unscientific comparison using a camera and fixed color temperature put them at ~3400K instead of 2700K, but other than that, colors on printed media seems to be natural enough, no obvious purple/pink hue that signals a lack of green in the color spectrum. I'm just extremely picky with these things, I can't unsee it since I know the difference.

Even fluorescent tubes at the office are Philips TL-D 90 De Luxe MASTER 940's - yup, they make them in CRI 90+ with a better phosphorus coating, it just costs more.

 

[Drizzt321]

I'd guess the whine is from the PWM circuit (brightness control) or the converter from AC-DC. Sounds like you found it was the later, so a better adapter should work. Annoying though. It's a solved problem, shouldn't be occurring.

 

[Badaboom]

My (albeit poor) experience with strip lighting, was that getting it to resemble any real white color is an expensive challenge. I did some RGB lights at one point, and the whites were so blue they were hideous. RGBW is a slight improvement, but I'm still just trying to settle on a pleasing color instead of a real white.

I'm looking into a couple of projects now. One is one that I mentioned a while back in the all-purpose thread.

Looking at getting an IR break beam sensor to kick on a light in the litter box area of our utility room. I found this project which looks easy enough, but I'm completely in over my head when it comes to programming any of this stuff. I've never really played with electronics, and I'm barely functional at coding. I can cookbook something all day long though. Is there an easy/good resource "for dummies" on what's going on with these ESP chips and how they interact with other things? I've come up blank when searching, but I'm sure I'm just missing a simple keyword or two to get to the right resource.

 

[ChaoticUnreal]

My (albeit poor) experience with strip lighting, was that getting it to resemble any real white color is an expensive challenge. I did some RGB lights at one point, and the whites were so blue they were hideous. RGBW is a slight improvement, but I'm still just trying to settle on a pleasing color instead of a real white.

I'm looking into a couple of projects now. One is one that I mentioned a while back in the all-purpose thread.

Looking at getting an IR break beam sensor to kick on a light in the litter box area of our utility room. I found this project which looks easy enough, but I'm completely in over my head when it comes to programming any of this stuff. I've never really played with electronics, and I'm barely functional at coding. I can cookbook something all day long though. Is there an easy/good resource "for dummies" on what's going on with these ESP chips and how they interact with other things? I've come up blank when searching, but I'm sure I'm just missing a simple keyword or two to get to the right resource.

I would check out ESPHome (https://esphome.io/) makes setting up ESP based projects super easy. Just need to create a yaml file (formatted text) and it does all the heavy lifting for you.

 

[Badaboom]

Does it matter which chip you buy? Adafruit has a bunch of $20 ones, and aliexpress has a bunch of $3 ones. I assume there's a middle ground that's easy enough to work with.

 

[ChaoticUnreal]

Does it matter which chip you buy? Adafruit has a bunch of $20 ones, and aliexpress has a bunch of $3 ones. I assume there's a middle ground that's easy enough to work with.

Doesn't matter for ESP Home. Might matter for what features they have ESP32 is the newer one that has bluetooth while I think the ESP8266 just has wifi.

 

[Badaboom]

Appreciate it. I bought a few of the NodeMCU ESP8266 boards and an IR break beam sensor (and some other general stuff). We'll see if I can figure this out. This should give me something other than watching the election to do tomorrow night.

 

[Drizzt321]

The Wemos D1 mini and various clones are cheap and good, I got some for Esphome for temp/humidity sensor project.

 

[ChaoticUnreal]

The Wemos D1 mini and various clones are cheap and good, I got some for Esphome for temp/humidity sensor project.

I just purchased a 4 pack of the xiaomi temp/humidity BLE sensors for ~16$ (it was ~8$ before shipping) and plan on using a NodeMCU / ESPHome to read them and get the data into HA. I don't think I could make a temp/humidity sensor for 4$ and saw a video about using ESPHome to read the sensors. With this 4pack I should be able to get a temp/humidity from most of the rooms in the house. (I might buy more to fully cover the house but I think it will just be hallways/bathrooms left to cover.) and I can use the NodeMCU to do other things as well.

According to the video I watched the newer Xiaomi ones require flashing a custom firmware (via your phone) but it seemed simple enough.

 

[Drizzt321]

The Wemos D1 mini and various clones are cheap and good, I got some for Esphome for temp/humidity sensor project.

I just purchased a 4 pack of the xiaomi temp/humidity BLE sensors for ~16$ (it was ~8$ before shipping) and plan on using a NodeMCU / ESPHome to read them and get the data into HA. I don't think I could make a temp/humidity sensor for 4$ and saw a video about using ESPHome to read the sensors. With this 4pack I should be able to get a temp/humidity from most of the rooms in the house. (I might buy more to fully cover the house but I think it will just be hallways/bathrooms left to cover.) and I can use the NodeMCU to do other things as well.

According to the video I watched the newer Xiaomi ones require flashing a custom firmware (via your phone) but it seemed simple enough.

I've got some cheap clones of https://www.adafruit.com/product/2857 which I wire in to the D1. Easy to flash to ESPHome too, and basically any standard USB wall-wart & microB cable can power them. Or even battery, although I'm not bothering since mine are fixed location and have power wherever I want them.

 

[Badaboom]

I managed to get the nodeMCU ESP8266 device flashed and running with esphome. The base setup is pretty straightforward and I got the IR break beam sensor that I purchased working properly and showing a connection and subsequent break at a distance of about 12". Now I just need to work through the rest of the tutorials to get it tied into my system (and actually solder stuff in instead of the hokey breadboard setup I have now).

My only hiccup was using a non-data USB cable on my ubuntu machine. This whole process was far easier than it should have been. Maybe the hard part is still in front of me.