Around the outside of my house I have a dozen BR30 dimmable LED bulbs in recessed fixtures. Right now I have them on a GE Z-Wave plus dimmer, and home assistant turns them on when I’m coming home and the sun is down - brilliant.
I’d like to take that to the next level, with RGBW bulbs. My wife and I both I like having switch control so I’m still going to want to be able to turn them on or off with a switch (replacing the Z-Wave dimmer with a Z-Wave switch) but also add the ability to have Home Assistant set color, brightness, etc. for holiday lighting, ideally with animations as a possibility.
My first go at this was to try MagicLight WiFi BR30 floodlights. Setting up and testing the first bulb - great. It was quick and easy to integrate into Home Assistant. I had to use home assistant to discover it at first in order to find it’s IP (in my router it shows up as ESPXXXX blending in with Nodemcu boards I’m running). Once I fixed the IP and configured it with that, Home Assistant was able to command it, even if it wasn’t on when HA booted, and when turned on with the wall switch, it would come on to the same color/mode it was in when last running. HA set its colors just fine, and the Magic Home app could configure the bulb to run animations. The light looked good, the warm white was a good match for my existing bulbs in both color and brightness.
Then everything came to a screetching halt when I put the lamp in one of the metal ceiling fixtures. I was able to get it back online by placing a WiFi repeater near it. Doing a factory default I was able to turn it on as a WiFi access point, and use my phone to map out its sadly reduced range. If it was jut my porchlight I’d use the repeater and be happy, but a network of WiFi repeaters below my soffits isn’t going to cut it.
I’m hoping a mesh networked solution would be the trick to overcoming the RF dampening ability of those light fixtures, but have come up empty when looking for BR30 RGBW floods that speak Z-Wave.
Recommendations for an RGBW (or possibly RGB) BR30 lamp, especially one that has been used successfully in a similar arrangement (outdoor metal cans up under the eaves, not powered when not in use) and not relying on cloud servers for operation would be appreciated.
Osram and Sylvania both have BR30 lamps (same lamp, rebranded, I believe) that look like they may fit the bill with the Osram bridge. Am I correct in understanding HA will speak to that Zigbee bridge directly?