Decided to try to fix some old LimitlessLED (Milight) bulbs

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aw

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#319830 6-Jun-2025 12:12

I've had a few of the LimitlessLED branded Milight bulbs start to fail on me lately (flickering) and I realised - they're approaching 10 years old - originally discovered them here on GZ.

But because I really like their "night light" (really dim) feature and can't be bothered changing out controllers, updating OpenHAB etc, decided to pop one open to take a look.

One 75c capacitor per bulb and a bit of solder later, three failing ones are back to as good as new.

Anyone else still have theirs? How old is the oldest smarthome thing you have?

richms

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#3381205 6-Jun-2025 12:25

Mine are all in a box because I moved to the tuya wifi ones when they became available. Even with the project to make the limitless MQTT controllable, they were not reliable. I did keep using the remotes with that to get inputs into HA for a while, but when that HA install blew up because I followed some details to get something else working and I started fresh I didnt bother reimplimenting the remotes and just stick with alexa control of the tuya stuff and HA only handles the automations

Some of the cheap tuya ones are now starting to flicker - goes away as the lamp heats up so its clearly a capacitor issue that is dying. At what they cost off aliexpress and how hard they are to open its not worth repair like this.

Irony is if they had actually spent 75c on the capacitors instead of putting cheap crap ones in, you would not be repairing them. Also, I have had better life out of the aliexpress lamps than the arlecs I got from bunnings because aliex doesnt have any small bayonet based bulbs.

Richard rich.ms

aw

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#3381211 6-Jun-2025 12:35

These were pretty easy to open - pop off the plastic diffuser, remove two screws. The next step involved soldering (detach the LED board from the power supply board to be able to slide the latter out through the heatsink), but the repair itself needed soldering anyway, so no biggie.

Had to swap caps on my Insteon hub too earlier this year.

Are you talking about reliability in terms of receiving signals? Admittedly I got around that in OpenHAB by having rules repeat commands to the bulbs 4 times 150ms apart. I also have to do the same for newer Xiaomi bulbs.

richms

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#3381213 6-Jun-2025 12:42

Reliability and consistency of control. Even from the RF remote, it would take several presses to get all the lights in a group to trigger, and then they would be out of sync with each other on the white or brightness since the remote was only relative - so would have to go all the way to one extreme of the white and then come back and hope that all lamps heard all presses of the button.

Multiple repeats was fine for on and off, but I would often end up with one or 2 lamps much brighter than the others. Didn't try it with later bulbs that had the remote with the slidey touch area on them as that may have been more absolute control. Basically once the wifi ones came along I lost interest in those lamps. The night light is a good thing to have, but I have other lamps that are for night lighting - little lit LED acrylic signs off aliexpress that I gutted their controller PCB and ran 4 core cable out to an external magichome RGB strip controller. Magichome has local control only on home assistant so I have to have them on a visible VLAN to HA, but they have been rock solid reliable for controlling them.

Richard rich.ms

aw

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#3381230 6-Jun-2025 12:57

Ah. Yeah these are the 2nd gen. Brightness level is different for white vs RGB, but otherwise absolute. The touch remotes were not good but besides having them to do the occasional factory reset of bulbs when moving them around, I don't use them at all anyway - all signalling is from or via OpenHAB - I have a whole bunch of Insteon 8x button remotes attached to walls, bedsides etc with printed labels taped over them which trigger Openhab scripted rules:

These send a proper signal with a brief button press, which is way better than both the useless Milight and Sonoff remotes which stop transmitting their signal the moment you let go of the button.

eluSiveNZ

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#3381245 6-Jun-2025 13:39

I got rid of the LimitlessLED bulbs some year back, but replaced some of them with the MiLight recessed LED downlights, as you say the Nighlight function was too good to give up, I havent found any other light offering this.

I'm running the ESP Milight module with an external antenna (via MQTT/HomeAssistant) and this has been rock solid for many years. I think I installed them around 2016 so geting close to 10years too.

I actually recently purchased 5 of the MiLight 24V garden lights, these are added to the same controller and work perfectly.