I can’t find any support documents on these Merkury Innovations bulbs. But now that there readily available at Walmart, is there anyway of getting support for these?
I couldn’t find direct links on the merkuryinnovations.com website, but did find them on the Walmart site.
White bulb MI-BW902-999W
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Merkury-Innovations-Dimmable-White-Smart-A19-Light-Bulb-60W-Equivalent-No-Hub-Required/512088827
Color bulb MI-BW904-999W
Too bad there are no replies yet. I just saw a couple of their smart plug and surge protectors on Walmart. Price is decent enough. Didn’t want to hijack your thread so I asked about that here.
Good luck!
Just happened across this thread & the other one – if this hasn’t been investigated yet, I’d consider debugging some of the protocols. I have no need for these though as I’m pretty well invested in the Hue infrastructure.
Don’t they use the Tuya app? This component is already in HA.
I saw someone that paired them with the Tuya app and then used the Tuya component on HA.
These bulbs, along with the Merkury smart switches are both on sale for Black Friday and Cyber Monday for $9.99. Maybe if me spread the word it will help attract attention. The switches are normally $19.99 so that’s the value. I see people on reddit homeassistant say the Tuya app works on a cell phone to add Merkury devices to HA.
I got the bulb to work with HA using Tuya. The bulb is very dim on color though, much dimmer than my Lightify bulbs. On white it is fine.
I should have read the tuya.py file as it doesn’t support the ‘flash’ effect, which is what i was looking for.
Mine work great, the white is definitely a similar brightness to my lifx but the color is dimmer but still ok
Do these work on your local network, or of of a cloud service? The docs in the component section are a little vague
I’m not sure but I’d say both if I had to guess. If you want me to check something specific to be sure give me instructions and I’ll give it a shoot. I’m not a programmer, but I good with computers, am learning.
Ok, So I have about 6 Merkury Bulbs (some multi-color, some white) that were purchased off the shelf at a Walmart for ~$13. These are fully functional with homeassistant, however there is a bit of configuration beforehand.
You will need the ‘Tuya’ app, yes the bulbs are ‘Merkury’ and use the ‘Geenie’ app, but you must set up with the ‘Tuya’ app. If the bulbs were already paired to the Geenie app, they need to be removed from the app and factory reset (there is an option when removing from the app).
In the Tuya app, you will need to create a new account. This account MUST be different from what was used for Geenie. EX: If you used your mobile number for Geenie, use your email for Tuya; vice versa if used email for Geenie use mobile for Tuya, or just use a new email address altogether. Regardless, it HAS to be different.
These bulbs are ‘hub-less’ so the state is stored on the Tuya servers, both Geenie and Tuya store account info in the same database more or less. This is why the accounts need to be separate and the bulbs removed completely from the Geenie app (this will remove the bulb link in their database to your ID).
CONFIGURATION.YAML
tuya:
username: TUYA USER ID (this is email or phone number that you registered, I used email)
password: TUYA PASSWORD (the password that you created when you registered with TUYA)
country_code: (USA RESIDENTS use 1)
EX: (email and password have been changed, but this is what you config should look like)
tuya:
username: [email protected]
password: Pass123Word!#$
country_code: 1
Save the file, then restart the homeassistant server. On reboot verify that there are no errors in the logs. If everything is successful, homeassistant should pull you bulbs into your dashboard!
If you have any issues, please let me know. It took me quite a bit of trial and error to get to this point, but this has worked for me and several colleagues without fail from here on out.
These Merkury products are awesome and the price point is spot on, I hope that you all find this guide useful.
Hi Mike,
Bought a Merkury light bulb this evening and am trying to figure out how to get Tuya to acknowledge my credentials made from the Tuya smart app. Is this information still the current way to get Tuya connected device to be displayed in HA?
Is there a certain spot in the configuration.yaml i should put the Tuya information in, or make a completely different file of that same name?
Thank you!
Last night I successfully flashed Tasmota onto 2 of these White bulbs with Tuya Convert
@rlongfield-
This is very interesting.
What programmer hardware did you use?
Was it hard to get the bulbs apart to get to the boards?
With the new firmware are they accessible locally without a dubious cloud connection?
I didn’t have to take the bulb apart or use a programmer.
I used Tuya-Convert (https://github.com/ct-Open-Source/tuya-convert). It works OTA.
When you are done the bulbs are running Tasmota and are completely free of the cloud!
Is there any special method? I’ve tried following the steps and I keep getting connection refused. I’m running it through a pi so all the stuff is on that and I’m using my phone as the intermediate device but its not backing up or anything. ideas?
I wrote up the process I used. I can get it to you tomorrow as it’s at work.
There was 2 things I needed to do that wasn’t in the steps.
Thanks, i’d like to get it working just to play around with it…
Totally understand. My bulbs sat in their boxes as I didn’t want them connecting to the cloud. I had planned on opening them and flashing them along the lines of the sonoff.
