[OBSOLETE] New Milight / Easybulb / LimitlessLED integration

Hi, all

I have been struggling. Uploaded image but not seeing the web page on NodeMCU. Have upload various ways.

No success on uploading the web page with Curl either.

Are there step-by-steps that I can follow, with direct link to the images?

I have been attempting to follow these guides:


Any help will be much appreciated. :slight_smile:

Eugene

Eugene,

I ended up using PlatformIO to flash the webpage separately.

  1. Click the button on the left side that says “run other target”
  2. Click “PIO upload SPIFFS image”

After that, you should get a successful flash message. Restart the board and you should be able to access the web GUI.

Rusty,

Is it possible to incorporate an improved RGB control? Something like the Aeon or Fibaro device type?

Does anyone have the MQTT functionality of Chris’ ESP8266MH working with SmartThings? If so, could you provide how you set it up?

Tonyvan, I expect there are problems with doing programs like that due to latency issues.

If I wanted to implement transitions, I would probably do it on the bridge side rather than the Smart things hub. That said, both I and Chris are certainly open to feedback.

If you make a pull request with this feature, I would be happy to accept it even if it doesn’t work great.

Hi All, I have added another way to control MiLights using existing scripts hung together in a similar way to this thread. This is how I am running my home set-up and have found it to work well - another option for those who get stuck.

Hi there,

I am completely new with smartthings and milights but I am trying to follow the great work done by you guys to set it up.

I have currently setup the ESP controller and I am able to go to the web interface put in the device id and control the lights.

I have also published the smartthings app, but I just cannot figure out how to set it up and what information to put in the initial setup sections. Any help on this will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks a lot for the help and grateful for all the effort gone into creating this for us noobs.

Best regards,
Fino

I have my nodemcu set up and working correctly - I can even capture events via MQTT; however, I am not able to set up Smartthings.

When I try to bring in the device handlers via the IDE - one is successful (milight controller) and the other is skipped (milight group controller).

Updated 0 devices and created 1 new devices (1 skipped due to errors)

When I try to install the smart apps I receive an internal error message and nothing is pushed.

Oh No! Something Went Wrong!
Error
500: Internal Server Error
URI
/ide/app/doRepoUpdates
Reference Id
9aff3746-2b3a-4cf9-87fb-99bfb4d5bd92
Date
Sun Sep 10 21:18:05 UTC 2017

I ended up using copy and paste to get the remaining device handler and smart app installed after making sure to add the primary individually first.

I think pretty much everything is working, I can control the lights through the web interface on the esp controller. I added gateway server
I have added smart apps of

  1. fireboy1919 : MiThings
  2. fireboy1919 : MiLight Manager

and Device Handlers of

  1. fireboy1919 : MiLight Controller
  2. fireboy1919 : MiLight Group Controller
  3. fireboy1919 : MilightLight

Added a new hub entered a name and the ip address of the esp controller into the MiLight Manager
but when try to create a new light I get Sorry there was an unexpected error. The live log is useless as it only writes Installed Hubs: Kitchen MiLights when I created and saved the Controller.

I am pretty new to smartthings but am not afraid to get my hands dirty

Anyone got any suggestions of how to debug what is going on/wrong?

Thanks

Apologies if it is hidden in plain sight - am relatively inexperienced, but are there any instructions on how to implement this using existing hubs and just amending the handlers / smartapps?

Thanks so much for this! Building the ESP based controller was easy and getting your integration to work was somewhat less, but it’s working.

I don’t know where the problem is, but installing from github fails on milight-light (app) and milight-group-controller (dht) so I had to copy/paste them into the smartthings API page.

Once I did that, I was able to add my controller and bulbs.

A few small issues:
1> Adding a new bulb the “ID” field says it’s optional but you cannot submit the form to add the bulb w/o it.
2> When using Alexa to control the bulbs, you can set the color, but when you ask it to turn the lights white, it sends “hue 0” instead of “set_white” to the ESPMH which does not result in a white light. I’m not sure if this is related to Alexa, your code, or the main code on the ESPMH
3> When setting colors, the saturation is really low (so it’s almost 100% white with just a tinge of color). Again, I’m not sure where the disconnect is, but I did notice there’s no saturation control on the smartthings panel for the lights.

Thanks again for all of your hard work and hopefully we can get these niggling issues resolved.

Hi…what code did you enter into the smart app manager to get different colours? I could only enter the decimal equivalent of the Hex code I got from sniffing the UDP packets to switch the lamps on/off

Hi, how did you get Alexa to choose a colour?

For anyone that has their bulbs also hooked up to a smart switch, I am using the Smart Lighting Smartapp under Automation/Smartapps/Lights & Switches in the SmartThings app to successfully update the status of the lights and switch simultaneously. I made an automation to go from the bulbs to the switch and one for the switch to the bulbs.

Would it be possible to set up a second hub that is always sniffing for traffic from the remote such that it could update the status of the bulbs in SmartThings if changed by the remote?

Last, anyone using RGBCCT bulbs, are you successfully setting any range of the white spectrum using the top color picker from within the device type? Is that function supposed to work? It seems to mimic the bottom color picker and only applies colors that line up vertically instead of the white spectrum.

  1. My bad. You do need to pick some number. Any number you like. I couldn’t figure out how to get them to coordinate and do auto-numbering.
    1. Unfortunately, the bulbs themselves act as a white bulb and a color bulb together. You can’t control them independently without making a new virtual controller that does really weird stuff to figure out how to combine the two. I suppose I could have actually made them two sets of bulbs, but that’s weird too.
      If you want to write that to support alexa, I’ll happily accept a pull request, but I’m not going to have time to figure out how to make the bad manufacturer design act better.

I did get Alexa working, I did some debugging and for reasons unknown to me, Alexa sends “hue 0, saturation 0” in order to set a bulb white. I realized the the saturation was not being passed through to the ESPMH from smart things so I modified your code to send saturation and also added a special case when saturation and hue were both 0, set to white.

It’s dirty right now I’ll try to clean it up and submit a pull request.

Thanks

So I know its been a while for me, but I thought I should give a few updates on some things I fixed/discovered on the hardware side and noted some new challenges on the software side.

  1. anyone else ever have crazy amount of issues with radios, never seem to find one that works? Well its not the radio actually, its your ESP.

After many head on desk moments, piss poor radio… I finally bought 4 different ESP packages and a put them on my RF bench/ EE bench to figure out what was going on. Oddly while fiddling around and waiting for some software on my scope to update I noticed that when I touched the antenna lead on the NRF/ long range … bobs your uncle… lights work like a champ…

Wait WTF? why?

Floating ground…@#$@#$%#@Q#$% floating ground.

Turns out that the data pin grounds are isolated from the power ground… this makes good sense in many perspectives as most folks will want to tie thier grounds down their own way, but for radio… its death.

YOU MUST have a ground plane for this to work if your device is powered from a grounded power source.

SO how? simple tie your VIN ground directly to your radio ground pin… ALSO to your Ground data pin… ALL THREE must be connected.

This makes the radio dead on stable… zero packet drop, really strong gain… and if you have a good USB charger, the range is pretty far…

  1. While sidoh’s work does fully support the FUT089 feature-set, fireboy1919 does not yet support it - solutions:

a) set everything to group 1-4 and just use rgb-cct (I have verified that it even works on the brand new downlights)

b) wait for me to submit a pull request and fix that as well as some other things (better FUT089 code handling)

  1. I don’t think that currently fireboy1919’s work is doing device state pulls… I will be trying to add that so that we have a better understanding of the lights state. (i.e. GET gateways/:device_id/:device_type/:group_id)

All that being said, I have a real job like everyone else, and my code skills are just no where near as awesome as sidoh or fireboy, so … hold your breath if you like, but you may end up looking like a smurf

Thanks, @Michael_Curtis. I’ve had issues with that.

I’d don’t personally have any FUT089 lights, so I didn’t write anything for them, but I would definitely accept a pull request. :wink:

And you’re right about state pulls. Sidoh added that after I wrote the original client, and since then, I got a job that took a lot more time and ALSO had a baby. So…work has been stalled a bit. Will definitely accept pull requests, however.

Other than that, I’d also like to split the device handler into a “white bulb” and a “color bulb” handler so that you can easily issue both types of commands from google home/alexa.

Anything going on with that pull request? I’d definitely like to add something like this.

Thanks for the reminder. Life has been crazy lately but I’ll try to get something put together this weekend.

The other thing I’ve noticed and I’m not sure where in the equation it happens is when you say “Alexa set bedroom saturation to 100” you get 100% white with barely any color vs 100% color which seems more correct to me? I want to play around with inverting or otherwise procesing the saturation and see if it works better.

Thanks