I’m very new to smart lighting and home assistant, progressing slowly as to not buy incompatible products so I’m looking for some advice.
I’v had the main goal to only use WIFI products (so no zigbee/zwave) and to upgrade my router to support more devices concurrently if needed.
I currently have:
Living room: Yeelight Ceiling 650
Master Bed: Yeelight Ceiling 480 + Yeelight lightstrip plus.
Stairs: Custom lightstrip controlled with NodeMCU ESP2866
I also have two yeelight bulbs (v2 x1 and v3 x1 (1S)) but these are currently not being used anywhere.
I have plans to pickup some nanoleaf light panels, some for living room, some for stairs.
Now, about GU10…
I have 6 GU10 downlights in the kitchen (and another 2 in the master en-suite) and am struggling to know which GU10 RGB smart bulbs to pickup that have decent integration with home assistant.
As I said, i’ve tried to stay away from zigbee, and also philips hue has not been an option because of the ridiculous pricing… but amazon black friday has some massive reductions on hue for the next 6 hours.
I’m looking at picking up
This for £70 (mainly only because the bridge alone is £40) - but I will use these 3 E27’s for lighting in the living room
3 sets of (£240 total)
So, questions
It still feels horrendous to be spending £240 on 9 GU10s (even with the sale discount) - Are there other RGB GU10 WIFI bulbs with good home assistant integration that you’d suggest be a better route than going with HUE?
Will I regret getting into HUE/Zigbee after prices rise back up to regular and I’ll be much more resistant to expand the hue setup?
Anything else I should be aware of for getting into HUE ecosystem?
Sale ends on these products in 6 hours, hoping to get some advice before it ends.
Thanks.
EDIT:
Another zigbee option I have seen is to still pickup the HUE bridge but get 4 sets of these instead (£208 total)
Limitless integration in HA is buggy at best. If you want to use Milight bulbs you might want to look to a DIY hub https://github.com/sidoh/esp8266_milight_hub/ which is net superior (also, as it is MQTT driven, it doesn’t need to be refactored for each new HA update).
Advantages for Milight:
cheap;
cheap;
cheap
fairly powerful (not the GU10 version but the larger E27 FUT105, above 1,000 lm);
easy to control with HA and pretty much solid performance if using the DIY hub;
multiple remotes can be used (with the DIY hub) to control same light (i.e to be able to control lights from different area of the house) and to have all of them in sync regardless of device used for controlling (physical handheld/wall mounted remotes; HA; mobile app);
single remote can pair to multiple bulbs (can easily implement scenes);
most important (only my opinion): although they require a hub to be integrated into HA, as the physical handheld/wall mounted remotes can be directly paired with the bulbs, it will help when there are failures in the home network; so you won’t be stuck in the dark as the lights can still be controlled by remote even if router/HA went offline
Disadvantages:
Milight protocol is essentially insecure (although it features some kind of encryption) so payloads can be picked up by a third party quite easy; however, that third party needs to be very close (like 10 m at maximum);
it does require the DYI hub to be used at full potential.
