I’m successfully using 60W GoControl Z-Wave light bulb, though need something brighter in the garage (plus GoControl has stopped listing these bulbs on their website).
I don’t feel confident enough to flash firmware.
In a hurry yesterday at Costco, I picked up a 2 pack of Feit Smart Bulbs thinking “I’ll bet there’s an existing integration”, though they apparently require a Tuya interface, which I am hesitant to use.
I see Cree wifi bulbs available, but no discussion of these in the forum outside of Tuya.
Any recommendations on other wifi or Z-Wave bulbs?
Have a look at this wifi esphome or tasmota bulbs. They are USA sockets, I infer this is okay for you. I have been experimenting with them and I am impressed. Native local right out of the box. As with any small production product for home automation, if it works, yes buy backups. An unfortunate reality of our tech lives and keeping sane with the significant other
David (@dprolffer), this is exactly what I was looking for, very helpful, thank you so much for the tip!
I had been blearily working my way through the Light Integrations page, and it seemed to mostly be about light subsystems, alarm panels, etc. Shelly seemed to hold out hope with an MQTT approach, though KAUF looks to be essentially plug and play. Again, thanks much!
Yes, lighting a real rabbit hole! But important, especially when it comes to the significant other. Nothing will send you to the ‘back patio (where is the wifi is poor)’ quicker than a ‘smart’ light bulb that randomly flashes in the middle of the night (been there) or the significant other jabbing the light switch in the kitchen and nothing happening (been there).
I hope you find the Kauf bulbs as interesting as I have. I’ve had good support interactions with the developer as well.
And again, you can flash a number of other (not all) open firmwares to the bulb without having to open it up. I have used this to create a kauf bulb with five separate pwm channels, one of each of the R, G, B, Warm and Cold colors. Just so I can manually mix them all and get a feel for what the different possible light colors are. Another one of those rabbit holes, but interesting, lighting ‘color’ in the home. It is very interesting to be able to set different light color/warmth in different rooms/times/occupants/uses.
I believe Athom is also selling ESP-based bulbs, pre-flashed with either ESPHome or Tasmota for you to choose from.
There were YouTube reviews I believe.
Also be careful: Most of the tuya bulbs on the market these days, are (unfortunately) not ESP-based, and thus not flashable any more. Those would talk to Tuya cloud, and you can control those via HA-Tuya integration over cloud. But if you really want your firmware and local control, one would need to do surgery for chip transplants, before you can load any customized firmware.
I have purchased, installed, and configured two Kauf bulbs that are working fine (for the last two days). Intriguingly, while I have added and started the ESPHome add-on, the bulbs do not show up there. Shouldn’t they, according to the documentation?
