Installation and Setup:
I hope you don’t need instruction on how to install a light bulb, screw it in and give it power, it should light up once it has power. Only power up one bulb at a time and follow the connection procedure. If you have multiple it can be hard to figure out which bulb hotspot you want to connect to.
If at any time during install or the life of the bulb you need to ‘reset’ the bulb back to factory conditions simply power cycle the bulb 5 times. Afterwards the “white” bulbs should flash or pulse to show they have been reset. “RGB” bulbs will cycle through colors to show it has been reset.
Download the “Yeelight” app from your respective app store. There is also a Xaomi home app that may come up, somewhere in the 300 post thread I linked earlier someone had trouble with that app so I recommend the “Yeelight” app.
Before starting the App connect to your homes wifi that you want the Yeelight to use. This will allow the App to automatically select the Wifi to connect to and makes things a bit easier.
Initial Setup:
Follow any prompts to sign in or create an account (I am already logged in and don’t want to create another account so no screenshots, sorry)
I don’t recall if the app will automatically put you on the add device screen or if you have to navigate to it. If you aren’t automatically sent there click the circle in the upper right and select “Add Device”
On the following screen select your respective bulb to add. Either “White Bulb” or “Color bulb”. The other devices are not supported by HA.
On the following screen select “Power On” and then “Next”
The next screen should auto select your Wifi network if you are connected to it on your phone. Supply your password and click next. This is saving your Wifi information to the App which will then connect to the bulbs Wifi hotspot and then the phone can supply the connection information and set things up.
Next you will need to leave the app and go to your settings. Find your bulb in the available Wifi connections and connect to it.
All of my bulbs have had a yeelight or Xaomi related name with a bunch of random characters. It should be obvious what Wifi network is the bulb. After you phone shows it is connected to this new hotspot, return to the app and the app should automatically see it is connected to the bulb and start the connection process. This can take a couple of minutes so be patient. You should see the status bar moving after a minute or so.
Troubleshooting:
If you don’t get progress on the connection status indicator or don’t get a hotspot setup, here are a few things to try.
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Be patient, it can take a minute or two.
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Return to your wifi settings and double check that your phone is still connected to the Bulbs wifi network that it sets up. I have had my phone disconnect for some reason and reconnecting and returning to the Yeelight app allowed it to finish the setup.
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If you can no longer see the Yeelight wifi connection in your phones wifi settings try cycling your phones wifi power. If it still doesn’t show try restarting the Yeelight app. I have had a bulb connect without showing progress or finishing setup.
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If all the above fails, cycle the power five times and start the process over.
Assuming everything went well you should have a bulb on the “home screen” of the app. I recommend you change the name of the bulb to something you can reference later and you will also need to likely update the firmware and turn on developer mode. All of these steps can be done by clicking on your bulb name which brings you to the settings screen below.
Selecting a bulb will bring you to the following screen.
Click the three lines in the upper right hand corner which will bring you to the screen below:
Click “Name” to enter a new name.
Then click "Firmware to update the firmware an enable Developer Mode. (Most of my bulbs didn’t have the developer mode available until I updated the firmware.)
Click “Upgrade Now” and you should see it download and install the new firmware. This should take a minute or two max.
Return to the settings screen and select “Developer Mode”
Click the toggle to turn developer mode on.
That it. Your yeelight is ready to be added to HA.
Home Assistant Setup:
As noted above HA will automatically detect your bulbs using the discovery component. I prefer to have discovery off and add devices manually. I find it helpful to have devices listed in my config file and you can name them right there and avoid some clutter in the customize section/file of your config.
As HA will utilize the bulbs IP address to setup the interface I recommend you user your router to provide the bulb a fixed IP. I recommend this for any wifi device you have, it can make troubleshooting much easier and it is also handy when setting up firewall rules.
Follow the configuration instructions at the component page.
My configuration as an example:
lights:
platform: yeelight
devices:
192.168.1.10:
name: Front Porch Light
192.168.1.11:
name: Garage Light Right
192.168.1.12:
name: Garage Light Left
192.168.1.18:
name: Yeelight RGB1
192.168.1.25:
name: Yeelight RGB2
192.168.1.26:
name: Living Room Lamp 1
192.168.1.28:
name: Living Room Lamp 2
I don’t use the music mode option or save on change option. Also I don’t use the transition option so it defaults to 350 ms which gives a nice fade on/off for normal use. Even without music mode the changes happen instantly to me and I have never had an issue with it not responding after multiple quick changes.
Home Assistant Interface:
All bulbs get an on/off toggle switch on the HA front end. For reference the bulbs listed in the bedroom card are my RGB bulbs and the bulbs under “Exterior” are white bulbs. Turning them on will return the bulb to the last state it was in. If the bulb was red at 100% brightness the last time it was on, it will turn on to red with 100% brightness when the toggle is used.
Both “White” and “RGB” bulbs only have a brightness slider available if the bulb is off. To get to the additional controls click the bulbs name and another card will be presented. Increasing the slider will turn the bulb on to the selected brightness.
If you have two bulbs in close proximity to one another that you want at the same brightness (it looks odd to me to have two lamps at different brightness) add both bulbs to a group and control the brightness via the group. This will sync the settings as both bulbs are controlled via a single selection.
RGB bulbs have additional functionality appear after the bulb is turned on. In addition to the brightness slider a “color temp” slider is provided and a color selector is also available.
Sliding the color temperature slider will move the color temp of the bulb. The extremes are a very warm color that looks almost orange to a very bright color that will appear very blue next to a “soft white” bulb. The selection you see above is the setting I use to match the “soft white” LED bulbs I have in our ceiling fixture that I got at Home Depot.
Clicking anywhere in the color map provided changes the bulb to the color selected. This will override the color temperature selected and use the color selected. You can adjust the brightness before/after using the color picker or color temperature slider. To return the bulb back to a “white” color, just give the color temperature slider a selection.
