Advice on wifi-enabled bulbs?

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#2285072 29-Jul-2019 10:26

The mitre10 cheapie iglo has no automation, no cloud control so at best you need to hope that someone has reverse enginered the protocol the app uses.

Real hit and miss on the aliexpress ones I have got recently. The old arilux has no B22, the others I have got have all been crap without dedicated LED controller chips, just using PWM like a cheap LED light strip, also one has the dual white not even real. It has cool white LEDs and when going into the colour temperature adjust then it uses the RGB to pretend to be white so you cant get a usable warm or neutral white out of it.

Richard rich.ms

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#2285087 29-Jul-2019 10:46

richms:

The mitre10 cheapie iglo has no automation, no cloud control so at best you need to hope that someone has reverse enginered the protocol the app uses.

Real hit and miss on the aliexpress ones I have got recently. The old arilux has no B22, the others I have got have all been crap without dedicated LED controller chips, just using PWM like a cheap LED light strip, also one has the dual white not even real. It has cool white LEDs and when going into the colour temperature adjust then it uses the RGB to pretend to be white so you cant get a usable warm or neutral white out of it.

Thanks for your advice, richms.

Yeah, I popped into M10 yesterday and realised that all the cheap bulbs they sell are highly limited.

The issue of 'real' white light is one that I've thought about as a risk, so interesting my fears are confirmed with some brands.

That said, am I right in interpreting the wording on the Kogan site ("Light your room with the perfect ambient white using this LED bulb") is a clear indication that these bulbs have separate LEDs for cool and warm white? (indeed, is 'ambient' essentially code for providing dedicated separate LEDs for whites in the same bulb?)

redfiat

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#2285282 29-Jul-2019 16:16

jonathan18:

richms:

The mitre10 cheapie iglo has no automation, no cloud control so at best you need to hope that someone has reverse enginered the protocol the app uses.

Real hit and miss on the aliexpress ones I have got recently. The old arilux has no B22, the others I have got have all been crap without dedicated LED controller chips, just using PWM like a cheap LED light strip, also one has the dual white not even real. It has cool white LEDs and when going into the colour temperature adjust then it uses the RGB to pretend to be white so you cant get a usable warm or neutral white out of it.

Thanks for your advice, richms.

Yeah, I popped into M10 yesterday and realised that all the cheap bulbs they sell are highly limited.

The issue of 'real' white light is one that I've thought about as a risk, so interesting my fears are confirmed with some brands.

That said, am I right in interpreting the wording on the Kogan site ("Light your room with the perfect ambient white using this LED bulb") is a clear indication that these bulbs have separate LEDs for cool and warm white? (indeed, is 'ambient' essentially code for providing dedicated separate LEDs for whites in the same bulb?)

iglo is supported in Home Assistant and works really well. You can fully automate it, control colour, etc.

I have not found any iglo bulbs recently in my local M10 though. I have 3 of them and had no issues but one did get very hot so I removed it.

Coreymck

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#2287331 1-Aug-2019 18:22

Signed up purely to reply to this thread, i have gone down the kogan/ Google home route myself and surely have jumped every hurdle by now.
It can be a pain, but im willing to help.

The lights do have a separate led for white light, and it's very warm/yellow. Of course you can recreate any color on the rgb side of things but it's much dimmer.
The dimming % is a bit strange, 50% is more like 80%. 1% brightness is more like 20%.
The app is clunky, and the apps routines can crash the whole system, you're best using Google homes routines.

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#2287605 2-Aug-2019 11:32

Coreymck: Signed up purely to reply to this thread, i have gone down the kogan/ Google home route myself and surely have jumped every hurdle by now.
It can be a pain, but im willing to help.

The lights do have a separate led for white light, and it's very warm/yellow. Of course you can recreate any color on the rgb side of things but it's much dimmer.
The dimming % is a bit strange, 50% is more like 80%. 1% brightness is more like 20%.
The app is clunky, and the apps routines can crash the whole system, you're best using Google homes routines.

Thanks, @Coreymck, appreciate you signing up to post your thoughts - always best to hear from someone who's used the actual products! Hope you're ok with replying to a few specific questions?

1. Do the colour bulbs only have a single 'white' light (the 'warm/yellow' setting you mentioned), not the ability to adjust the colour temperature of the 'white' between 'cool' and 'warm' (or, potentially, anywhere in between)?

2. How do the colour bulbs respond to the default Google Home light settings, eg "daylight"?

3. Are they relatively easy (and reliable) in terms of initial set-up? The instructions I saw made it seem quite convoluted compared to the Mi bulbs, which were damn easy and quick.

4. How do the bulbs respond to being turned off and on at the wall switch? (Do they immediately turn on when the switch is turned back on; do they remember the last setting or return to a default; and does the wifi quickly reconnect without issue?))

5. Have you tried out Kogan's 'ambient' white bulbs (the ones that allow selection of warm or cool; unsure if it allows graduated control or if only binary), and if so how are those?

Good to know about (and not surprised at the flakiness of!) the app; I imagine, just like the Mi bulbs we have, similarly we'll do all management via Google Home.

Thanks again for your help.

huckster

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#2287653 2-Aug-2019 13:14

Am also intrigued by the Kogan bulbs as apparently you can flash them with Tasmota.....

I have some original Belkin Wemo and TP-Link coloured wi-fi bulbs. The latter are a little picky when it comes to WiFi connectivity but both look nice (to me).

The former were in the bedroom until we had a power cut. :-)

Coreymck

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#2287833 2-Aug-2019 19:28

jonathan18:

Coreymck: Signed up purely to reply to this thread, i have gone down the kogan/ Google home route myself and surely have jumped every hurdle by now.
It can be a pain, but im willing to help.

The lights do have a separate led for white light, and it's very warm/yellow. Of course you can recreate any color on the rgb side of things but it's much dimmer.
The dimming % is a bit strange, 50% is more like 80%. 1% brightness is more like 20%.
The app is clunky, and the apps routines can crash the whole system, you're best using Google homes routines.

Thanks, @Coreymck, appreciate you signing up to post your thoughts - always best to hear from someone who's used the actual products! Hope you're ok with replying to a few specific questions?

1. Do the colour bulbs only have a single 'white' light (the 'warm/yellow' setting you mentioned), not the ability to adjust the colour temperature of the 'white' between 'cool' and 'warm' (or, potentially, anywhere in between)?

2. How do the colour bulbs respond to the default Google Home light settings, eg "daylight"?

3. Are they relatively easy (and reliable) in terms of initial set-up? The instructions I saw made it seem quite convoluted compared to the Mi bulbs, which were damn easy and quick.

4. How do the bulbs respond to being turned off and on at the wall switch? (Do they immediately turn on when the switch is turned back on; do they remember the last setting or return to a default; and does the wifi quickly reconnect without issue?))

5. Have you tried out Kogan's 'ambient' white bulbs (the ones that allow selection of warm or cool; unsure if it allows graduated control or if only binary), and if so how are those?

Good to know about (and not surprised at the flakiness of!) the app; I imagine, just like the Mi bulbs we have, similarly we'll do all management via Google Home.

Thanks again for your help.

Not a problem, happy to help so it's easier for anyone in the future.

1.) It seems not, the "white" led in the bulb is one colour frequency, only the brightness can be adjusted. You can get the RGB led in the bulb to make white, but its so dim in comparison its unusable unless night time.
The colour is very similar to a 60watt filament bulb. Warm and yellowish, not nasty.

2.) The bulbs do not like most of the google home colours on the list. "candle light, daylight, incandescent, snow" (forms of white) all do not work, If you say yellow, green, blue etc they will. I'm guessing the hue bulbs with more frequency control would have no probs?
If you want a particular colour, you can always manually use the app, I believe you could store that colour too, and set it to a routine, and call it whatever you want.

3.) Pretty easy really, screw em in, flick the power on and let the app prompt you for the rest. Just needed wifi password and location on, its simple. I have managed to break them to the point of needing to reset them, and that's done fairly easily too.

4.) Wall switch off then on will cause default white light at 100% brightness, wifi reconnects within 10seconds. once re connected it will stay on that default colour (even if you've asked the room to be 'blue' prior to flicking the switch off at the wall)

5.) Havent tried! quite keen to know myself. I mainly purchased the RGB ones at first so i could do some crazy lighting schemes, but the white was good enough to shove in almost every downlight I have.

The first hole I fell into was having 25+ devices connected on wifi. Silly me thought you could have up to 255 no problem, but I started getting dropping out issues. All bulbs run on 2.4ghz, so a lot of network clutter. All be it I'm using a standard isp issue huawei hg659 router, tried setting static ips router side for bulbs (didnt work for me, may be my own fault.) I cabled everything in the house that could be cabled, ran everything 5ghz I could, and its stable now (14 bulbs)

If I want to install another bulb right now i would have to have my phone connected to 2.4ghz network, start the installation, once the bulb finds the network mid install id have to swap the phone over to 5ghz to complete installation to allocate the bulb a free slot in the router. But for some reason I can keep doing this and adding bulbs one at a time?

Second issue was scenes seem to break every now and again. The app has a "flash rgb" type mode. I renamed it "party mode" in the app as a scene. Then I set a routine in google home to run that party mode scene when i ask it to, which worked until one day 2 bulbs (in different rooms) were stuck in party mode. When i asked them to turn to white, they'd turn off. I could get them set to any colour i wanted but its like the white led in them had blown. I went through the Kogan help desk, they said they were faulty and sent out a 4 pack replacement. I reset the bulbs manually and they worked fine again! win win. Has happened a few times now, very frustrating, best not to play around with voice control of scenes in the app.

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Coreymck

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#2287841 2-Aug-2019 19:42

All in all I'm happy with it, I say hey google, turn all the lights on and they do every time.

I can make the lounge blue and the bedroom pink, or dim them all or individually by voice.
I called the lights what room they are in and a number. Bedroom 2, lounge 6, hallway 3 etc, easy to track when you want a certain look.

Interestingly while on the topic, I have a wifi socket from the same brand, and plugged my lounge lamp into it. The lamp has one of those hipster fancy many filament bulbs in it. I called the socket "the lamp" in the app and in google home.
Once google home saw the word lamp, it automatically stacked it in the lounge lights category and now comes on when i say 'turn the lounge lights on'. Obviously no dimming function.
I started to become annoyed that it does this, there is no way in google home to 'unstack' a lighting group. I could allocate it a different room, or call it "the potato" etc and it would unstack and work as normal.

I hope Ive helped in some way!

thanks, Corey

Coon

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#2317901 14-Sep-2019 18:43

irongarment: I'm going with Ikea Tradfri. It's Zigbee based, and is apparently compatible with Philips and Xiaomi. Since we don't have Ikea here yet I'm getting stuff from UK, Europe and Oz. I have the Ikea hub, which is working with their app, but I also had a Python script going that would talk to the hub to do things programmatically. That script is currently not working as the Pi is was running on is broken.

The Ikea bulbs power up with the same brightness/colour settings they had when the power was cut, so they act like regular bulbs in that regard, but obviously for normal use you keep the light switch on all the time.

Tradfri is usable directly with Echo and Home? a few months ago I went to Ikea OZ, there was a sign, compability is coming in the next few months, it it compatible yet, or do you still need to buy the tradfri hub for it to work?

richms

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#2317905 14-Sep-2019 18:50

Bunnings have a range now of arlec stuff, it uses their grid connect app which is tuya based. I got the $22 smart socket today, and it paired up fine with tuyasmart when I put it into AP mode and connected to the ARLEC ssid.

They have a pack with 2 CCT lamps, and 2 smart sockets for $60 which seems like a good deal, and there are B22 and E27 RGB-CCT lamps that were $25 or so from memory. When I looked in store they were not on the bunnings website, but there are heaps of grid connect appliances and stuff on the AU bunnings site which I assume will come here eventually.

Richard rich.ms

jonathan18

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#2317931 14-Sep-2019 20:02

Thanks for the heads-up on those Arlec products - will go check out my local store tomorrow.

jonathan18

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#2318015 15-Sep-2019 09:46

I visited Bunnings this morning, but only one of these new Arlec products was available - the 2 bulbs and 2 switches pack. The other bulbs listed (one bayonet, the other screw) were showing in their system as $12.50 each, which doesn't match what you saw in-store.

The Aus website shows a much wider range, and hopefully what we'll get here:

B22 and E27 bulbs in both colour temp adjustable and RGB, for $20 and $25 respectively
R80 bulb for $30
2m white LED strip for $40
5m RGB LED strip for $60 (Could be ideal for an Ambilight-ripoff for a TV perhaps? I was looking for an alternative to the Hue)
a couple of outdoor lights
even black or white panel heaters, for $50

https://www.bunnings.com.au/search/products?q=arlec%20smart&redirectFrom=Any

Much better value compared to other brands on sale in NZ, and less risky than buying from o/s in relation to insurance etc.

disillusioned

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#2326883 29-Sep-2019 22:30

Has anyone bought the Arlec Grid Connect stuff from Bunnings? Wondering how their app is and how well their stuff works.

I had a look at the East Tamaki/Botany Bunnings today, they appeared to have wall switches as well as a double wall outlet available that were Google Home compatible, double plug converters (each outlet can be controlled individually in software but not physically), and a variety of lightbulbs.

Was actually looking for the four or five outlet power strip - but as above, while you can control each outlet in the app there's only one physical switch on the power strip itself. Not sure why they've taken this approach, but I like the idea of the power strip being compatible with Google Home. The only close contender I've seen is a TP-Link Kasa power strip that hasn't come to AU/NZ yet (think it's only available with US sockets at the moment).

Like one of the posters above, I started on the smart home journey with a regular ISP-issued wifi router and only a few devices - by the time I've expanded this (and have 20-23 devices connected to wifi at a given time), even with a new TP-Link Deco M9 wifi router I see all the smart plugs go offline multiple times a day - it's very annoying so need to get around to addressing this.

richms

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#2326908 30-Sep-2019 00:09

Ive bought the kit with 2 lamps and 2 sockets, as well as an RGB lamp.

They work fine with the Tuya app, if you already have that connected to GH/alexa,

Like most of these magic pairing things, it didn't work for me, but there is a second way in the app where you hold the button on the plug more, or on the lights turn them off and on a few more times and it does another flash, then it brings up an access point called Arlec- something on the plugs and smart-something on the light (from memory) - it will be the only new strong open AP your phone sees. Connecting to that and the setup went flawlessly.

The RGB light has some other scene names that appear when you go into it which I have not seen on other tuya RGB lamps - mines in the shed and powered off at the moment so cant get into it to see what theyre called. The RGB is done differnt to others, there are 6 preset colours that you can program up, but asking alexa for red or blue etc still works.

From memory the scenes let you set 5 or 6 colours, and then if it fades or steps thru them and a speed control. Wasn't successful in asking alexa to set them to the scenes however.

Richard rich.ms

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#2326911 30-Sep-2019 00:57

Coon:
irongarment: I'm going with Ikea Tradfri. It's Zigbee based, and is apparently compatible with Philips and Xiaomi. Since we don't have Ikea here yet I'm getting stuff from UK, Europe and Oz. I have the Ikea hub, which is working with their app, but I also had a Python script going that would talk to the hub to do things programmatically. That script is currently not working as the Pi is was running on is broken.

The Ikea bulbs power up with the same brightness/colour settings they had when the power was cut, so they act like regular bulbs in that regard, but obviously for normal use you keep the light switch on all the time.
Tradfri is usable directly with Echo and Home? a few months ago I went to Ikea OZ, there was a sign, compability is coming in the next few months, it it compatible yet, or do you still need to buy the tradfri hub for it to work?

Yip. I've got about 20 Tradfri devices interfaced to Home and Echo. They also come into home assistant really nicely.

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