HomeBrite Smart LED Bulb

Configuration
1

Has anyone configured a HomeBrite Smart LED light bulb with Home Assistant? I picked one up at Home Depot that was returned already so it was a little cheaper! However, looking at the Components - Lighting page I don’t see HomeBrite listed as a supported vendor.

If it is supported is there an example of an yaml template needed to get it working?

Thanks in advanced.
Jason

2

These seem to be bluetooth bulbs so won’t be supported by HA for now, as we don’t have a Bluetooth component yet. For supported bulbs you have quite a few options.

3

Thanks for the quick reply. That’s what you get when you grab something on the run and don’t do your research first!

Side note: i setup the Philips HUE w/3 light bulbs as my first smart device and wow was that easy!!! Fun stuff!

Jason

4

Yep - love my hues :slight_smile: just can’t stop buying them …

5

Got that right. I just ordered 4 more bulbs and 4 light strips! So much fun using this with Siri and HA!! My wife is pretty blown away so far!

6

My wife appreciates the automation but she won’t let me use “weird colors” … I sold it on the basis that she could have whatever color of soft warm white that she liked, which worked, however she is still vetoing my plans to have the porch lights green for Saint Patrick’s day and purple for Halloween! I will get some of the strips eventually, probably as lighting for our kitchen work tops when we get it rebuilt …

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7

HAHA! Yes, that is exactly what my wife said as well! However, she is on-board with colored themes only for the holidays! So, i’m extremely excited to integrate my Raspberry Pi Christmas Tree display into HA. Baby steps first and getting the lighting in place house wide.

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8

Are we looking at possibly being able to use these now that we’re getting closer to a Bluetooth component? I have the Raspberry Pi 3 so I know it has a Bluetooth component built into it and these home bright smart LED bulbs have the Candelabra size I’m looking for. For the other bulbs in my house I use Philip hue but they don’t have candelabra.

9

Seconding this question, as Home Depot had the BR30 version of this bulb on sale (clearance maybe?) for $5. For $5 I am happy to use the app on my phone, but it would be AWESOME to get it tied into Alexa. And if I can get it running in HA, I can run it with Alexa. :slight_smile:

10

So as it happens, this can be done now. It’s kludgey as hell and not complete control, but you can do it.

Turns out that the HomeBrite bulbs use a protocol called CSRMesh, and this GitHub project is a (at least partial) reverse engineering of that. Once I got it cloned, built, and installed, the CLI worked a treat for turning the bulb on and off. And once you can do it from a command line, it’s just a command-line switch (using the MAC address of the bulb and the PIN you set when you originally installed the control app):

switch:
- platform: command_line
  switches:
    lrlight:
      command_on: "csrmesh-cli lightbulb --dest xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx --pin xxxx --level 255"
      command_off: "csrmesh-cli lightbulb --dest xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx --pin xxxx --level 0"
      friendly_name: Light Bulb

And once it’s a switch, so long as you have the emulated Hue hub set to pick up switches, Alexa can talk to it.

I dunno if this would work directly with a Pi3’s Bluetooth (I imagine it would) but I plugged a Monoprice USB mini BT adapter into my Pi2 and it worked perfectly. The drawbacks: I’m limited to on/off states (I don’t care because I only want all or nothing) and because it connects to the mesh separately, it isn’t able to poll for a state, so if you turn the bulb on through other means, HASS won’t pick it up on its own on the Dashboard. Oh, and it’s pretty slow…there is a several second gap between Alexa saying “ok!” and the light actually activating, probably through the handshaking of the BT adapter connecting to the mesh separately.

So hopefully you can adapt any or all of this to your own needs! Like I said, it’s not perfect, but if it can be done like this, hopefully it can eventually be done in HASS, especially when the protocol is a known entity now and can cover several brands.

1 Like
11

Do you have any more details on how you accomplished this? I have these bulbs and would love to set them up to be used with Alexa or home bridge. I don’t use the hue hub, is that required? Anyone else with information about these bulbs and HASSIO?

12

Yes, in order to make Home Assistant components visible to Alexa, you either need to have the emulated Hue hub configured or you need to have a Haaska instance set up. Based on your questions I’d recommend the former for you for now. It’s really not hard to set up.

13

Thanks. I used the emulated_hue and it worked well for my z-wave lights and switches. Now on to try to get this bluetooth mesh network up and running!

14

Do you know if this is possible using HA on a RPi3? I’m still learning this whole environment/platform and am not completely versed in the various maturations of OS/platforms.

15

I don’t see why not; if anything in my research I think I had to backtrack to make sure it would work with an Rpi2 with USB Bluetooth dongl3, as everyone assumes now you are on a 3 with the BT built-in.

16

Thanks. I hate to be a bother, but could you point me in the direction of how to "clone, build, and install’ from git hub link? Again, I’m still new to this whole paradigm.

17

Any update on this working right from HASS?

18

Thanks for sharing. I’ve been trying to get my HomeBrite bulbs to work with HA without much luck. And lacking the necessary skills I rely a lot on luck and hope someone will post exactly what I need.

I did my best to follow your exmple.

I’m using HASSIO 69.1
I put “python_script:” in configuration.yaml file.
I created a “python_scripts” folder in config file using Samba

I downloaded csrmesh and it’s 3 dependencies from Github.
I unpacked them and them put in the python_scripts folder using Samba.

The python_scripts folder now contains:

  bluepy-master
  bluez-master
  csrmesh-master
  pycryptodome-master

I put your code in my switches.yaml file with a few minor changes:

platform: command_line
switches:
  homebritelight:
    command_on: "csrmesh-cli lightbulb --dest E0:34:E4:00:00:00 --pin 1234 --level 255"
    command_off: "csrmesh-cli lightbulb --dest E0:34:E4:00:00:00 --pin 1234 --level 0"
    friendly_name: MyHomeBrite

I restarted home assistant and clicked on the MyHomeBrite switch and got the following error:

Command failed: csrmesh-cli lightbulb --dest E0:34:E4:00:00:00 --pin 1234 --level 255

I have no idea where to go from here. Can somebody help me please?