Best RGB Smart Lights for Home Assistant (2019)

Hi there,

I’m looking for recommendations for relatively inexpensive “smart bulbs” for Home Assistant. Previous threads have recommended the Yeelight ($30) and LIFX ($45) bulbs – are these still good choices? Ideally I’m looking for something bright and inexpensive that I could use with some Home Assistant automations.

Thanks for any and all recommendations!

Yeelight is still the most often recommended budget pick. I don’t have any so I can comment on the validity of that.

LIFX and Hue are still the most often recommended premium picks. I have Hue and, while they work very well when they work, I have issues with Hue and Home Assistant being able to reach one another resulting in automations that don’t fire and lights that don’t change when they should. It could be my network, but I doubt it.

Tuya OEM bulbs are super cheap. Not quite as good as the Yeelight, but really cheap. Like, sometimes $5 or $8/bulb. And very regularly $15/bulb. And we used to be able to flash them with Tasmota or ESPHome. This is getting less and less possible thanks to firmware-replacement preventative measures on Tuya’s part.

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We use Tradfri Ikea bulbs with deCONZ, works a treat.

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I have 2pcs of Yeelight Color Bulbs 2.
They are working fine in my automations.

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I got 12 yeelights integrated now. Works like a charm for me.

But I got them for around $15 dollar each when they were in sale.

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I have Yeelight bulbs, LED strips and also Philips Hue bulbs and LED strips. Both brand work fine on my setup, no issues with commanding them, so I guess those who are reporting turning on/off or colorize issues have some local problem on their network.

Yeelight is a good budget. But do not expect the same brightness and vibrance of colors as Philips has. They are using RGB leds which are ok, but on many color gradients it’s unable to emit enough brightness. For darker rooms or under the couch or as flood light it’s perfect. But if you need bright and vibrant colors, go for the Hue.

The new second gen Yeelight bulbs are also good in brightness. The company increased the brightness above 800 lumens in some color range, but the vibrance and colors are still not premium. The Yeelight LED strip hasn’t got update, they are okey for casual purposes, but not for professional ceiling lighting.

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I’m curious as in how your setup is.

I got my light’s on sometimes when it’s not even dark yet, and still i don’t seem to have any problems with the yeelights.

Running V1 and V2 here. Although the V2 does have a better rightness

I don’t have problem with the Yeelights. I am just saying if I compare to the Hue lights the Yee is not so bright and the colors are not so vibrant. Eg the yellow color is not close to the real bright yellow color, like the Hue can emit. Same for purple and white. On the LED strip it’s even worse. These are the weakest points.

But for the price the Yeelight really worth it. It’s much cheaper than the others.

In Europe we have German cheap light named: Muller Tint: https://www.mueller-licht.de/ Price is from 8€ to 12€. The are some copy of Hue light, but are brighter. Hofer or Aldi shop have them. You can pair them on Hue hub or Zigbee modul.

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Tp-link lights integrate very easily and reliably with HA on sale you can find the as cheap as $30. The only down side is I wish they were brighter.

LIFX and Hue are too expensive for me. I have Yeelights and LimitlessLED (Mi-Light) In fact the reason I originally found Home Assistant was because I wanted to control LimitlessLED lights in Google Assistant. The rest is history.

Milight - here you can find many different bulbs and controllers, in good prices.

The downside to MiLight is that the state of the light is assumed. The bulbs do not talk back to the system to report their settings.

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Anybody here have Eufy lights? I already have a few Eufy switches and would prefer to stay in that ecosystem/not have yet another app/company to deal with if possible.

You can receive updates and have the bulbs in sync (however, not with the official ibox): https://github.com/sidoh/esp8266_milight_hub

I use this. And yes, it sends updates. But it only sends updates based on commands it receives, or commands that it saw sent over RF. Neither of these is the actual state of the bulb. If you remove power from the bulb and then turn it on using a remote or the milight_hub, the bulb will still show “on” even though it has no power.

In my case, I have 5 MiLight bulbs set up in one room. Sometimes, if I issue all of them a command, milight_hub sends the commands too fast (perhaps) and one or more of the bulbs won’t actually get the message and change. But MiLight hub sees it as changes and Home Assistant reports it as changed, even though it isn’t.

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In regard of the actual state of the bulbs, I can confirm that even with Philips Hue bulbs appear to change their state (different color or brightness) in HA, although they’re offline (ie. no power) - still this might be a bug with the Hue gateway.

You should check the NRF24L01 as some of these boards are knockoffs (if, after 3-4 consecutive commands, they lose packets, then the board is likely broken; alternatively, if you pair the bulb with multiple remotes and with one of the remote IDs there are packet losses - although not with the others - then the entire pairing process should be redone). Adding a second ESPMH gateway should help both with coverage and reliability of packets. You can check the wiki for tips and tricks.

I have Phillips Hue as well. When I remove power from the bulb, it reports in HA as “unavailable”. If I issue a bulb command from HA and unplug the Hue just before I do so (before it’s had a chance to report unavailable) the UI updates to show that I’ve sent the command (even though the state hasn’t changed) and 10 (or less) seconds later (the Hue Poll Interval) it updates back to what it was or says “unavailable” depending on exactly when I unplugged it.

And thank you for the tips on making milight_hub more reliable.

But, that doesn’t change the fact that these MiLight bulbs do NOT send information. They only receive information. So this is an assumed-state platform, regardless of if you use iBox, milight_hub, or a remote control. The command is sent… the bulb never indicates if it listened or not. They don’t have transmitters in them. Only receivers.

Well, this is sort of true even for Hue: if bulb reports to the gateway that it has changed its state, it doesn’t mean it didn’t lied about it (just like politicians do :smile: )

Here are some redundancy tweaks for lights (might apply to other brands):

  • LDRs attached to ESP8266 boards in each room to check if the light level is sufficient and repeat messages case it didn’t turned the bulbs on or off (can get even more complex with TCS34725 instead of LDR as it checks on RGB too) alongside DHT22 to be able to check on the environment settings in each room;
  • Scripts to periodically send turn off payloads to bulbs that are already off (case previous messages didn’t work);
  • Set the brightness to 1 prior to turn the bulbs off (as it creates a smoother transition when turning the bulbs on and won’t disrupt sleep case of a power failure during the night) - this actually assumes bulbs are powered on 24/7 and not turned off from physical switches => thus creating the need for smart switches (either native MiLight or other technologies);
  • Physical MiLight wall remotes (B0/B4); although I previously encountered some issues with ESPMH, I’ve never seen any packet loss from physical remotes; the bulbs are already paired with multiple physical remotes IDs and the ESPMH syncs all of them (by forwarding update topic from secondary remotes to the command topic of the main remote defined in HA).

Absolutely. One could give the device some sort of state with an LDR. But… if I’m going that far, I may as well just build the LED too and scrap the MiLight entirely.

Also, absolutely an option.

I’m not saying MiLight are worthless. I have them. I use them. They are great. But… for roughly the same amount of money it would take (not to mention time to build) all the parts to have a proper state reporting light bulb, one could just buy a proper state reporting light bulb.

If state reporting isn’t important, then there is value in MiLight, for sure.

And, yes, if there’s a hardware malfunction and the bulb reports one thing even though it’s not doing it, that’s a different issue entirely and state will be incorrect. This goes for every device ever made ever. If the device intentionally lies about its state, or if there is a malfunction in its state reporting, all bets are off. But, a MiLight doesn’t even try to report state. And, for some people, this is important.

Another example… I have older ZWave switches that don’t report state, but they can be asked for their state. I have Home Assistant configured to ask for the state periodically. However, doing so every second causes too much traffic on the network. So I do so every 30 seconds. This means if someone turns on one of these switches manually, Home Assistant doesn’t know about it for 30 seconds or so. It’s annoying even when you know this is the case, and VERY annoying when you don’t realize and are bashing your head against the wall trying to figure out why it’s not showing as “ON” in Home Assistant.

None of this is me saying “don’t buy MiLight”. Again, I own some, and they serve their purpose. But, I feel like anyone buying them should be aware of their limitations before doing so.