First project in HA, please be nice to me for any obvious glaring errors, but I would love feedback!
I have a yard lamppost with 3 candelabra sockets. My goal is to a) have these work normally on my “front outside light” switch but also b) set custom colors to celebrate whatever I feel like celebrating. I’m replacing a Caseta wall switch with a dumb switch to power the circuit without worry of its dimming circuit damaging the bulbs. Since I have a 4th bulb left over it’ll go into a living room floor lamp to accent the other non-smart warm white LED bulb in the thing 
I’m using Lohas RGBWW bulbs from Amazon. p/n LH-ZN037E-XWL. These have RGB, CW (cool white), and WW (warm white, really more of a yellow) LEDs on them in an E12 candelabra base.
As my experience with “smart bulbs” was zero, I naively tried the Lohas (rebranded Tuya) app. Terrible, really stinking bad. (They have my SSID and key now. Oh well.)
It didn’t take long to find tuya-convert and HA, so I was off down the rabbit hole.
I now have scenes and automations which are reliably using the white LEDs (and not mixing RGB to produce white) which was a big issue for a while. And I have things set to where my old-school manual-throw switches cause the lights to boot up in a warm white at moderate brightness using a mix of the WW/CW LED’s, which fulfills the expectation of getting light when you flip a switch (with about a 2-3 second delay, which is fine for my current usage).
I thought I’d put this together for anyone else looking for a better experience to build on.
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Set up your tuya-convert environment. For me, it was a raspberry pi model 3b. I dropped the latest Raspbian on an SD card, fired up the Pi, and followed the tuya-convert project’s instructions over at github, which really are not at all difficult for a non-developer network admin like me. I dropped tasmota 8.3 on the bulb in this process.
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found the bulb’s ip on my router, connected to the bulb via http, changed the config / other / template I found at the tasmota device templates site. Be sure to checkmark the “Activate” box, I was earnestly told.
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ran setoption78 1, and uploaded tasmota-lite 8.3 firmware. (For some reason I can’t seem to upload esphome unless I do this first.) I then use the bulb’s web UI to check the bulb’s operation too, make sure the pin mappings were correct (red actually operates red led’s, etc).
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added esphome to my HA. This was only a challenge because esphome’s documentation gives old instructions where to add it. otherwise super easy
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created a new esphome device, based on esp8266, and edited to fill it out:
(see this community post regarding “better_rgbww_output.h”)
esphome:
name: livingroom1
platform: ESP8266
board: esp01_1m
on_boot:
priority: 750
then:
- light.turn_on:
id: livingroom1
# set white LED brightness and color balance between CW and WW
# this is my own preference. you should choose yours
color_temperature: 3300K
white: 40%
includes:
# contributor [displaced] developed a workaround for properly using the CW/WW LEDs by setting the RGB color to white
- better_rgbww_output.h
wifi:
# obviously fill in your own stuff here
# Enable Home Assistant API
api:
# password: !secret api_password
password: 'u-choose-this'
ota:
# Define output pins
output:
- platform: esp8266_pwm
id: output_red
pin: GPIO5
- platform: esp8266_pwm
id: output_green
pin: GPIO4
- platform: esp8266_pwm
id: output_blue
pin: GPIO13
- platform: esp8266_pwm
id: output_warm_white
pin: GPIO12
- platform: esp8266_pwm
id: output_cold_white
pin: GPIO14
# Define a light entity
light:
- platform: custom
lambda: |-
auto light_out = new BetterRGBWLightOutput(id(output_red), id(output_green), id(output_blue), id(output_cold_white), id(output_warm_white));
App.register_component(light_out);
return {light_out};
lights:
- name: livingroom1
id: livingroom1
- uploaded to the bulb, confirmed esphome’s console showed it connected, went to configuration >> integrations and the new bulb was there and ready to be added.
Thumbs up!!
definitely made my experience with home automation much, much, much more eye opening. I’ve got a few Caseta wall switches, Nest thermostats, and Unifi cameras for home automation so far, but HA looks really, really exciting. The possibilities are limited only by my very meager wallet.