Pesetech Artificial Skylight: my first attempt at creating an integration

Third party integrations
21

Hey @giovanni! Sorry, I haven’t get any email notification from this forum and since life happened, I was not actively working on PeseTech integration.

However, recently I got my own HomeAssistant and I’m re-visiting the topic as well as ESPHome part. I replied your PM :slight_smile:

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22

Hello everyone, I have great news.

tl;dr

Someone developed a BLE Mesh to mqtt bridge that you can run on Linux to control any BLE Mesh light with color temperature and brightness control (that is, a Pesetech SkyLight).

The process

  • I realized that the Pesetech Skylight is a simple BLE Mesh Sig Light with brightness and temperature control. In fact, you can provision and control it using any of the numerous apps available for BLE Mesh Sig devices (nRF mesh, TelinkSigMesh, etc.). I did it and it works.
  • Therefore, I could write a some code for an ESP device to be a BLE Mesh provisioner, provision your SkyLight and control it. I tried and failed as follows:
    • Using Arduino IDE the restrictions in using BLE Mesh capabilities are too many, therefore is not only impractical but I believe impossible
    • Using ESP IDF it is tragically complicated: there are so many limitations (e.g., not enough memory to use WiFi and BLE at the same time) that even using the default ESP IDF examples I never managed to do anything
  • I stumbled upon a relatively old and for sure unmaintained GitHub repository that allows you to provision a BLE Mesh Sig light and control it (on/off, brightness and light temperature).

It is not very easy, but if you follow the instructions in the github repository carefully you can do it.

It would be nice to have a BLE Mesh integration for Home Assistant, shoutout to the developers to continue the work of the github user @blackmyas.

How to control your Pesetech Skylight

Here is the github repository:

Bear in mind that the program doesn’t work very well and autodiscovery does not work with home assistant, therefore you’ll have to configure your own MQTT light in configuration.yaml.

Here is how I did it

Note that:

  • The values of brightness and color_temperature are very weird, I know, but after many trial and errors it worked excellently
  • When the SkyLight has no power (e.g., if you cut off electricity in the house), it will reset completely and you will have to provision it again

Home assistant’s configuration.yaml

mqtt:
  light:
     - name: "Skylight"
       unique_id: "skylight"
       state_topic: "homeassistant/light/mqtt_mesh/skylight/state"
       command_topic: "homeassistant/light/mqtt_mesh/skylight/set"
       schema: json
       brightness: true
       brightness_scale: 65280
       supported_color_modes:
         - color_temp
       min_mireds: 50
       max_mireds: 1250

Additional useful information

  • To reset your skylight you need to:
    • Turn on the power (that is, give electricity to the Skylight)
    • Wait 1 second
    • Turn off the Skylight (that is, remove power completely)
    • Wait 5 seconds (the manual says 10, but 5 are enough)
    • Repeat this 5 times
    • Turn on the Skylight (once again, give it power), now it will blink and be ready for provisioning
  • You can start the homeassistant-bluetooth-mesh docker container at boot by simply enabling the docker service in systemd
  • I’m working on a script to automatically provision the Skylight if it has been reset, it would be extremely simple but being a docker container makes it a bit more complicated
  • If you send wrong values for brightness and color_temp via mqtt, the homeassistant-bluetooth-mesh program will crash and you’ll have to restart the docker container
23

Thanks for that! That process is a bit complicated for me. I used a bit of a work around, namely using the google home integration and then using a Starling gateway to share that with home assistant and homekit. This works reasonably well most of the time. You can even use the Adaptive Lighting HACS integration to control the light this way to make it more naturalistic.

I did speak to the staff at pesetech (as a note, they are much more responsive via whatsapp than email, I even got them to fully replace a light that had died). They mentioned that they have a newer version that uses Tuya drivers but unfortunately then it would not be compatible with the smart panel they sell, which I already have installed. So While definitely not perfect, this solution works for me most of the time.