I build my own smart lights to avoid this kind of bs. Thanks to ESPhome i didn’t even need to program them myself. Everything is in an offline VLan and connected to Homeassistant.
Because then the lights wouldn’t change brightness or color temperature with the angle of the sun, my motion sensors wouldn’t work, and the light wouldn’t turn on together with my morning alarm.
Speaking of color temp, I shift my local environment’s hue with blues in the morning to assist with alertness, and reds at night for improved low-light vision. I do it manually with an IR remote I have conveniently velcro-taped to the wall next to the light switch. I am interested in your automated setup, I could see it being useful for tying the lights to the security cameras (motion is detected, triggers main lights to full brightness, play doberman_barking.mp3).
I find it funny how people who are not working with any kind of electronics are the ones who have smart homes, smart bulbs, smart keys, smart tv’s. People who work in it have nothing connected to the internet, except their own server with a hammer next to it.
Sometimes it can make sense… other times it doesn’t. Many tech entrepreneurs want to just own shit and claim they have brains and ideas when they don’t.
Remember the juicero? A wifi connected juice press using proprietary juice bags? It was a very extremely expensive overengineered piece of junk. With features that are wholly unneeded… and what is even dumber is that the juice bags can be squeezed by hand faster and more efficiently than by the machine!
Still, the ‘inventor’ got 120 million dollars in investments. The company went under a long time ago, but he probably is still sitting on a pile of cash.
Oh, reading your reply made me feel a bit hypercritical, LOL! While I’ve never heard of the “juicero,” I do own a “Bartesian.” It’s a cocktail-making machine, where you supply the alcohol, and the various cocktail mixers come in a Keruig-like packet. You insert the packet, select the strength of beverage you want, between non-alcoholic (who does that?) to strong, place the appropriate cocktail stemware (or Soho cup) underneath, then drink away.
I’m not too hypercritical though…it works really well, and is a party hit.
That machine you described sounds a hell of a lot more practical than the juicero. I am not a fan of keruig machines because I feel they are wasteful (but that is just me. I won’t argue that they are very convenient). But a keruig machine but for cocktails sounds like a decent idea.
I have a friend who has wireless everything, and bragged he even had a wifi coffee maker.
So when I asked him for coffee, he walked to the kitchen, grabbed a cup, but it under the coffee maker, walked back, fidgeted with his phone while showing me how cool it was, walked to the coffee maker, got the cup, came back and handed it to me.
I have been looking into this kind of thing. My impetus is wanting to connect my Android alarm clock to Home Assistant and set it to trigger my espresso machine to power on 30mins before I wake up. I saw ESPhome recommended for the smart plug. I’m sure I’ll find other uses once I set it up though, maybe even building my own light bulbs.
I’ve got a Sever running Homeassistant with the ESPHome Addon.
The Lights got a custom PCB in them using a ESP32 and a 4 channel warm/cold white led strip driver. But you can also build them using of-the-shelf parts.
They are mains powered without a switch, instead i wired the switches to a sensor input. This allows me to control the light either via the switch, or Homeassistant. They even got some buttons directly on them to force them on/off if my server is down.
I also got a radar in there for presence detection. Basically the same as an infrared motion sensor, but it doesn’t turn the light off while im on the toilet.
Thanks to using Homeassistant, I can change the color temperature and brightness of the lights depending on the time of day. It’s really nice to have some dim and warm lights in the evening before going to bed.
But ESPHome isn’t limited to some custom build stuff. Anything that uses an ESP32* chip can be flashed to run ESPHome instead of whatever it came with.
I got some sonoff relays that control my shutters and an Emporia Vue 2 to measure my power usage. Depending on the device you might be able to flash it either via Wifi or you have to disassemble it to get to the programming pins. The nice thing about the ESP32 is that a vendor cannot lock the firmware. You can always flash something custom.
ESPHome isn’t limited to Homeassistant however. You can also have each device run a web-server to control it, or connect it to MQTT.
Also i should mention some alternatives:
Tasmota: similar to ESPHome, but while ESPHome as the configuration compiled into the firmware Tasmota can be reconfigured on the fly. Not like the update process of ESPHome is slow however.
WLED: if you only want to control some addressable RGB led strips. It does that one job way better than ESPHome.
It also supports Beken bk72xx chips which are often found in cheap Tuya devices. I have them all reflashed with ESPhome which eliminates the cloud middleman
https://esphome.io/components/libretiny
I build my own smart lights to avoid this kind of bs. Thanks to ESPhome i didn’t even need to program them myself. Everything is in an offline VLan and connected to Homeassistant.
Why don’t just use simple lightswitches?
Because then the lights wouldn’t change brightness or color temperature with the angle of the sun, my motion sensors wouldn’t work, and the light wouldn’t turn on together with my morning alarm.
Speaking of color temp, I shift my local environment’s hue with blues in the morning to assist with alertness, and reds at night for improved low-light vision. I do it manually with an IR remote I have conveniently velcro-taped to the wall next to the light switch. I am interested in your automated setup, I could see it being useful for tying the lights to the security cameras (motion is detected, triggers main lights to full brightness, play doberman_barking.mp3).
I explained my setup here
I see you’re a person of culture. I too get flashbanged every morning by all my lights.
This is the way.
I don’t need ANYONE to control my house when not in my house, and if that means I don’t get to either, then oh well.
I find it funny how people who are not working with any kind of electronics are the ones who have smart homes, smart bulbs, smart keys, smart tv’s. People who work in it have nothing connected to the internet, except their own server with a hammer next to it.
This isn’t true.
It’s a meme that achieved urban legend status.
Speak for yourself my main server is explicitly firewalled from the modem
Well, many industries seem very interested in dragging us “happy with being manual people,” kicking and screaming, into all this tech crap.
Sometimes it can make sense… other times it doesn’t. Many tech entrepreneurs want to just own shit and claim they have brains and ideas when they don’t.
Remember the juicero? A wifi connected juice press using proprietary juice bags? It was a very extremely expensive overengineered piece of junk. With features that are wholly unneeded… and what is even dumber is that the juice bags can be squeezed by hand faster and more efficiently than by the machine!
Still, the ‘inventor’ got 120 million dollars in investments. The company went under a long time ago, but he probably is still sitting on a pile of cash.
Oh, reading your reply made me feel a bit hypercritical, LOL! While I’ve never heard of the “juicero,” I do own a “Bartesian.” It’s a cocktail-making machine, where you supply the alcohol, and the various cocktail mixers come in a Keruig-like packet. You insert the packet, select the strength of beverage you want, between non-alcoholic (who does that?) to strong, place the appropriate cocktail stemware (or Soho cup) underneath, then drink away.
I’m not too hypercritical though…it works really well, and is a party hit.
That machine you described sounds a hell of a lot more practical than the juicero. I am not a fan of keruig machines because I feel they are wasteful (but that is just me. I won’t argue that they are very convenient). But a keruig machine but for cocktails sounds like a decent idea.
I have a friend who has wireless everything, and bragged he even had a wifi coffee maker.
So when I asked him for coffee, he walked to the kitchen, grabbed a cup, but it under the coffee maker, walked back, fidgeted with his phone while showing me how cool it was, walked to the coffee maker, got the cup, came back and handed it to me.
He did appreciate me asking about wireless mugs.
Oh I can control my stuff remotely. After connecting to my VPN that is.
I have been looking into this kind of thing. My impetus is wanting to connect my Android alarm clock to Home Assistant and set it to trigger my espresso machine to power on 30mins before I wake up. I saw ESPhome recommended for the smart plug. I’m sure I’ll find other uses once I set it up though, maybe even building my own light bulbs.
I use it to slowly turn the lights on 20 minutes before my alarm goes off. It’s great fun
Building a home assistant at the mo…our main impetus was a Flood Event in the basement brewery lol
First time i’m hearing about it. Sounds very cool! Would you mind sharing your setup and how it works?
I’ve got a Sever running Homeassistant with the ESPHome Addon. The Lights got a custom PCB in them using a ESP32 and a 4 channel warm/cold white led strip driver. But you can also build them using of-the-shelf parts. They are mains powered without a switch, instead i wired the switches to a sensor input. This allows me to control the light either via the switch, or Homeassistant. They even got some buttons directly on them to force them on/off if my server is down. I also got a radar in there for presence detection. Basically the same as an infrared motion sensor, but it doesn’t turn the light off while im on the toilet. Thanks to using Homeassistant, I can change the color temperature and brightness of the lights depending on the time of day. It’s really nice to have some dim and warm lights in the evening before going to bed.
But ESPHome isn’t limited to some custom build stuff. Anything that uses an ESP32* chip can be flashed to run ESPHome instead of whatever it came with. I got some sonoff relays that control my shutters and an Emporia Vue 2 to measure my power usage. Depending on the device you might be able to flash it either via Wifi or you have to disassemble it to get to the programming pins. The nice thing about the ESP32 is that a vendor cannot lock the firmware. You can always flash something custom.
ESPHome isn’t limited to Homeassistant however. You can also have each device run a web-server to control it, or connect it to MQTT.
Also i should mention some alternatives:
It also supports Beken bk72xx chips which are often found in cheap Tuya devices. I have them all reflashed with ESPhome which eliminates the cloud middleman https://esphome.io/components/libretiny
There must be simpler ways than every bulb having a network interface…
Maybe, if it were up to me the entire control system would be centered in my electrical panel. But doing that after the fact is quite difficult.