So on my last trip to Home Depot, I noticed Phillips is now selling a large line of WiFi Enabled bulbs, directly alongside their Hue counterparts. The same bulb for these is about half the cost of the Hue bulbs (ZigBee vs. WiFi). I call them the WiZ bulbs, since thats the name of the app that controls them, but a search on the forums here and on google, reveals that no one else calls them that. They have an app that integrates with them with Alexa, but I’d like to skip all that and hook them into HA.
Yet searching the forums turns up surprisingly little given where these are sold. Perhaps I am using the wrong terminology. I have 4 of these now for testing, but I havent gotten them working yet. Any ideas?
So to recap- I bought these Phillips WiZ bulbs from Home Depot the other day. I tried to use them with the default software but it just doesn’t work well to integrate. It’s stuck on the cloud and it’s own app.
I popped one open and took a look - expecting a big company like Phillips to have come up with a novel solution and yet sure enough inside was an ESP8266 WROOM-02D.
Been trying to flash it though with little success. Only tried using the Tasmota and Espflasher tools. Not sure where Tuya fits into the picture but I was wondering if this is appropriate to use this on this product.
The underlying developer of the light is TaoLight (rebranded to Phillips) as someone mentioned. They mention an open source API. Yet they have not responded to my emails - nor can I find this so called “open” source.
I am hoping to get these to work as the light reproduction is of much higher quality than the standard bulbs that are reflashed. Many more LEDs and better ones. More worth the effort. There’s 3x the LEDs in general and 6x the White LEDs and the construction is of higher quality.
Price was $12-$15 depending on the style. They have a vintage filament style (my wife) is particularly interested in.
I was able to solder a wire to RX TX IO0, 3.3 and Gnd. But I was not able to flash Tasmota. It fails.
In Termite terminal I get gibberish back. I am wondering if perhaps it’s actually Chinese and my character set is wrong. But I can’t figure out how to change it in termite.
Yea I actually just saw that. I did successfully flash it. I’ve Ben working to identify the traces and the circuits - I haven’t had time to get it to work- not that I haven’t been able to - I think I can - I’ve identified two pins but not the rest.
This. Is the downlight- the recessed light retrofit. If this works and the color is as good as hue lights it’s a good value at $15. Although the time spent working on it is worth more than the $15 at this point… ($35 for a similar hue device). I’m still learning Tasmota on other devices before I get back to that.
The bulb unit I looked at though- the other part they sell- it’s completely inaccessible so only the ota method might work. Though it doesn’t even try to connect to sonoff so it would require additional work.
I have 4 of the Wiz downlights from Home Depot and really like them. I control them indirectly from Home Assistant through the IFTTT interface. That works surprisingly well for me - e.g. one of the lights is in my front porch ceiling and I am triggering it from a webcam motion detect -> HA -> IFTTT -> Wiz. I realize the indirect method is not as elegant as a direct interface but just pointing out there is workable interim method until a direct interface is available…
Yeah, I returned mine about a week after my post. Decided to go with some tuya-based bulbs as there are already several on Amazon with the filament style for about the same price that can be flashed OTA. Check out Doresshop or Sealight. Doresshop even has a candelabra smart bulb with filament and those are rare at the moment.