Merkury Light Bulb

Hardware
1

Has anyone tried to flash Tasmota or EspEasy onto the Merkury light bulb?

I just picked a couple up on a Black Friday deal and of course I popped one open and poof it’s using an ESP8266 chip.

I can see 6 pads on the circuit board but they are not labeled.

So my question is, has anyone flashed one of these bulbs? Is there an easy way to determine which pad is which?

Light
Light3840×2160 1.74 MB

2

I dont know if we have the exact same model, I got mine from walmart too… has the 1050 lumuns color version. anyway I sucessfully flashed tasmota onto it with an OTA method I kinda struggled with it but its working now, the problem I’m having now is none of the configs seem to work it correctly. the Homemagic will give me on/off and brightness control which is 90% of what I need but I would like to get the colors working too just cause sometimes thats fun.

I used this thread https://github.com/codetheweb/tuyapi/issues/49 to do it. one guy made a script to do it, but at the end they actually point to https://github.com/ct-Open-Source/tuya-convert saying it works better. wish I would have known that before I struggled getting it to work. but I have others to do and will try the tuya convert method. now if we could get someone to make a module setting to take advantage of all its features. I do like they can get much dimmer now… the old firmware would turn them off way brighter then they go now.

3

Yes, tuya-convert is amazing.
Out of curiosity what tasmota module type do you have selected for these Merkury bulbs?
The Arilux LC11 seems to make it turn on/off okay but I can’t get any other controls to work.

4

I just found out about tuya-convert last night. I was going to use the tuya.py script to act as the “Home server” for my bulbs but now I’m going to give Tuya-convert a go.

gtjokester I have the plain white bulbs.

5

Color bulbs here.
I played around a bit more and put Espurna 1.13 on last night.
The color is still uncontrollable, but if you set the color all the way to red, then the brightness slider works well and gives a very bright bright, and a very dim dim.
Has someone that has torn one of the color ones apart already been able to see the LED driver chip? Is it one of those MY92XX styles or is this just 3,4,5 channel PWM coming straight out of the ESP?

6

I m using Arilux LC01 module. I got on/off and brightness control… just no color

7

I’ve been playing around with ESPHome trying to figure out what’s what on these bulbs. Since the Arilux LC01 seems to control the brightness correctly, and the LC01 is all PWM, I was initially assuming there is no RGB controller (like the MY9291).

I’ve gone through and tried most of the GPIOs as PWM but nothing seems to control the colors:
Here’s my ESPHome config:

light:

  • platform: monochromatic
    name: “Merkury Test”
    default_transition_length: 0s
    output: pwm_output_gpio##

GPIO2 makes it turn on always and there’s no way to turn it off
GPIO3 makes it turn on always and there’s no way to turn it off
GPIO5 makes it turn on and off correctly, but no brightness control
GPIO12 doesn’t seem to do anything
GPIO13 makes a dim white
GPIO14 doesn’t seem to do anything
GPIO15 doesn’t seem to do anything
GPIO16 doesn’t seem to do anything

Seeing that, I’m thinking there might be some sort of RGB controller. Anyone know of a good way to test things out to determine that? I’d be happy to buy one of these bulbs for someone if they know how to reverse engineer it.

Jon

8

I was finally able to get tuya-convert to work last night.
I successfully flashed Tasmota on 2 of the white Merkury bulbs.
In Tasmota I used the generic module and then set GPIO5 to PWM1

This gives me ‘on/off’ control and I can also dim the bulb.

2 Likes
9

Yes it works great (white only) with ESPHome as well…

light:
  - platform: monochromatic
    name: "Merkury Test"
    default_transition_length: 0s
    output: pwm_output_gpio5

output:
  - platform: esp8266_pwm
    pin: GPIO5
    frequency: 500 Hz
    id: pwm_output_gpio5
10

I, too, was able to flash tasmota onto a white Merkury bulb. I can turn on and off and dim from the web interface, but have only been able to turn on and off from home assistant. I’m guessing I just have the mqtt topics for brightness wrong, but I’m very new at home assistant. Do you have any suggestions? Here’s what I have:

light:
  - platform: mqtt
    name: "Living Room Floor Lamp"
    icon: mdi:floor-lamp
    command_topic: "cmnd/MerkuryLRLamp/power"
    state_topic: "stat/MerkuryLRLamp/POWER"
    brightness_state_topic: "stat/MerkuryLRLamp/Dimmer"
    brightness_command_topic: "cmnd/MerkuryLRLamp/Dimmer"
    qos: 1
    payload_on: "ON"
    payload_off: "OFF"
11

I would go to the tasmota console and type in “SetOption19 1” and in your configuration.yaml under your mqtt broker info put in discovery: true and the. HA will see it and configure it automatically. It will show up in your integrations and just delete the light config you have above

12

Apparently someone knows has reverse engineered these bulbs to work with Tasmota.
https://blakadder.github.io/templates/merkurya21.html
I’ll try to use that to reverse engineer into ESPHome.
Unless I’m blind, the “base” used (69) isn’t in the documentation:


Just for clarification, I’m talking about the color (75W) bulb, not the white (60W) bulb.
13

I tried this and it didn’t work.
Then I read up on MQTT Discovery and it doesn’t seem as simple as you explained it. Mind you I was about 20 mins out from bed so that could have played into my understanding of the process. But I read about having to issue a number of MQTT commands while discovery was on.

14

I did some testing last night.
I hadn’t noticed that I had no dimming capabilities in HA until you mentioned it.

I tested the bulb in the bulbs web interface and I was able to fully dim the bulb.
I checked the console and noticed that after I changed the brightness level with the web interface there would be a Result line with the dimmer details.

I noticed that Dimmer in the result line was spelt with a Capital D, I was using a lowercase d in my cmnd/bulb/dimmer line.

I change it to cmnd/bulb/Dimmer and I got some control. sort of a 2 settings brightness control. Bright and dim. The slider positioning was inconsistent with the dimmest setting being closer to the bright end of the slider.

For my Sonoff B1 bulb the brightness command topic is: “cmnd/sonoffB1/dimmer”

I’m going to try some more testing. I wonder if it’s because I used the Generic Tasmota Template?

15

I think that I got it to work after adding brightness_scale: 100

16

Just added that to my entries and I’ll give it a test tonight

17

Hmm… well I did cover it quickly as I was at work… maybe I didn’t explain it very clearly. In the configuration.yaml file under where your you put in your mqtt broker info you add a line discovery: true to turn on discovery of mqtt devices. Then in tasmota you go to the console page and type in SetOption19 1. That makes tasmota set the topics to be discoverable to home assistant. Might also want to check the tasmota version you are running, I’m not sure when this feature was added I just updated the firmware as soon as I got tasmota installed but seems to me it didn’t work in the version I first flashed onto the light so I you didn’t do anything update maybe that’s why it’s not working

Also you go to the configuration section in home assistant and then to integrations to see the mqtt devices it finds.

18

Here is the config I came up with:

It’s two lights because the LED driver is part of FastLED and not a general output

1 Like
19

Yeah I put in a feature request at ESPHome to have an output component for SM16716 like they have for MY9X91.
https://github.com/esphome/feature-requests/issues/83

1 Like
20

Thanks for the further info.
I was able to get the bulb working perfectly by adding brightness_scale: 100 as suggested by @lustreking.
However I will remember your suggestion for future Tasmota devices I add.