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Comment by nevi-me | Hacker News Reader

Better late than never, I have 3 of their bulbs in the house, and not being able to integrate with HA prevented me from buying more (at least before Matter was announced).

I've been using them with Google Home, so the lights weren't automated with HA. I'll try the integration out.

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I have bulbs from wiz, which already have HA support.

Being new to all this home automation stuff I was quite intrigued how they worked though. They're exposed on the WiFi network over a really simple UDP based protocol which led me down a rabbit hole of writing a little go client to mess about with them, took a few evenings.

Not saying Xiaomi bulbs would be quite as simple to write an integration for, but they might have been. It's kind of fun seeing how people have reverse engineered all these custom protocols.

They sold bulbs under various brands. I’ve got some very old ones branded yeelight that work entirely offline with HA.

Tried to rebuy got a different brand and they don’t work offline properly. Bit of a crapshoot

These days I try to buy preflashed tasmota gear. Things like athom.tech

I got some of those Yeelight ones (gen 1/gray plastic and gen 2/white plastic!) but my experience has been really bad. Even if their app allows you to enable local mode it's laggy and just... stops working after a while, it also seems to break if it can't reach xiaomi servers (pihole). Wondering how you got yours to work, mine are just trash at this point and i've since switched to proper local devices.

Zero lag. If they lose power they revert to cool white. All local. Checked home assistant and its direct integration (yeelight)...no mqtt.

And looked up my old notes - copied in below though don't recall details of what I did. Suspect maybe I used the python stuff just to check that lan is enabled rather than editing

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https://github.com/Squachen/micloud

pip install micloud

miiocli device --ip 192.168.1.88 --token FOOBAR info

On iphone go to yeelight app, select the apps overall setting menu and enable lan control

Just to confirm, you are using the Yeelight app for this setup? On android there's Yeelight Classic (red icon), Yeelight (purple icon), Yeelight Pro (black icon) and the Xiaomi Home one. I think some of my issue might have been that region lock thing that kept changing a few years back (someone mentioned in another parent here). I remember setting it up on the Yeelight (red) but it eventually had me switch to Xiaomi Home (green app) which then required re-setting it up on another cloud region, which then broke again after a while.

I'll give this python script a try for sure, glad to know you got yours to properly work!

Both the red yeelight classic and green Xiaomi Home is showing as previously downloaded on my iphone. Afraid I don't know which (was years ago) but I'd try red first

...and that too feels on brand for Xiaomi...utter chaos on branding.

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