Sidoh esp8266 milight hub no unique id

Configuration
1

Hi all,
I am rather new to Home Assistant. I made the sidoh esp8266 milight hub and I have setup HA to find the lights automatically. An awesome feature by the way! It works I see the light in my lovelace view and I can add it to my custom lovelace view.
But now I wanted to ad it to an automation (simple switch to turn on the light) but I can’t find it in the actions part of the automation view. So I went to the entities and searched it there. I have found it but when I open it I get this message: “this entity does not have a unique ID, that is why no setting can be adjusted from within the user interface” (my translation :slight_smile: ). But I see that the id is
light.gang_boven

Is there something else I need to do to properly use this light (and future lights added this way)?
Any help understanding this is welcome.

Greetings,
Aaron

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You have an entity, so you have all you need to create an automation.


  action:
  - data:
      entity_id: light.gang_boven
    service: light.turn_on
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So, in automations, actions I chose edit in YAML and put in your code? So, there is nothing wrong with my setup? It just can’t be done the way I thought it should be done?

4

You can do it from the GUI

image

5

Yeah, thanks! :slight_smile: It works.
Thanks for your fast help, now I can go on playing.

6

Hi @SilverApe, or anyone following up on this topic, this set up guide might help. It fills in some of the blanks in Sidoh’s guide, which itself is excellent, but is aimed I feel at those with some experience of Arduino stuff.

Sidoh’s project is a DIY hub for about £5 that means you don’t need to use the official Milight hubs, and you can have as many groups as you like, unlike the limit of 4 with the official hubs. I just set one up yesterday and seems to be working fine:

7

Hi @Tim10,
Thanks for this elaborate guide. I have it running in HA without problems for months now but this guide is also useful for other people. It works better than the standard hub. The only obvious downside is that there is no feedback if the light is on or off.

8

Thanks, yeah the lack of feedback is an inherent downside to these Milight bulbs. It’s the one downside I’ve found so far. I can live with it I think for the price they were.

9

Thanks for the link to Jackson’s guide Tim, which is very helpful.

Unfortunately I found the instructions there, for installing the firmware on the NodeMCU using PlatformIO, far too lengthy and complicated. I’m fairly experienced in this sort of stuff, but just couldn’t get it set up without errors being thrown at me. This may put people off implementing this incredible project.

Instead, I’d recommend anyone who wants to build one of these hubs just download and flash the latest pre-compiled firmware binary and flash using the NodeMCU-flasher. As described in Chris’ blog. So much simpler and quicker.

I will just say that I’m on a PC and don’t know if the NodeMCU-flasher program can be run on other platforms.

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Hi John, yes you’re right, on windows, flashing the binary with the NodeMCU-flasher is probably simpler. Chris does recommend the PlatformIO method as the first option however. On Linux I couldn’t get the flashing to work without using the PlatformIO method, so the opposite to what you found :slight_smile:

Glad you got it working, that’s the main thing hey!