I got some of the lifx outdoor path lights and spot lights at Home Depot on clearance. So far I’ve deployed 2. I assumed when I added them, the lifx integration would be better, but since they connect to standard 12v landscape lighting wire and my transformer turns off during the day, the integration goes into a failed state when the lights lose power.
So I was wondering. Is the matter integration for lifx (or any device that loses power) better in this scenario? How does the matter integration handle devices like this?
Both integrations will do the same thing: if the device loses power, it’ll be shown as offline.
Also, the LIFX integration has way more functionality than the Matter integration at this point. You can’t do anything LIFX-specific via Matter. It’s essentially just very basic control.
If you want to be able to control the three color zones of the Path, you’ll need to use the LIFX integration. Support for this is coming Real Soon Now tm. I’m working on Ceiling support at the moment, which is far more complex.
I think I’ll stick with the lifx one then, thanks! My concern was I noticed that the lights integrations showed failed even when powered back on but I just tried and they actually appeared to come back on relatively fast.
I’ll run some more tests, I just don’t want to depend on some unknown polling time for home assistant to bring the “integration” back online.
It’s not (quite) unknown: Home Assistant will rediscover the light as soon as the light announces its mDNS entry, assuming Home Assistant can see that mDNS announcement, i.e. it’s either on the same subnet or you have mDNS relaying configured.
Home Assistant also attempts to sniff DHCP packets looking for IP address assignments requested by and assigned to devices that start with the known LIFX MAC address prefix.
In the case where the mDNS announcements and DHCP allocations are unseen by Home Assistant for whatever reason, the LIFX-specific UDP broadcast based discovery occurs every 15 minutes.
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