Mirabella Genio smart lights with Tasmota and Home Assistant

One of the things I like about Home Assistant is that it allows you to take hardware from a bunch of various vendors and stitch it together into a single consistent interface. So for example I now have five home automation vendor apps on my phone, but don’t use any of them because Home Assistant manages everything.

A concrete example — we have Philips Hue lights, but they’re not perfect. They’re expensive, require a hub, and need to talk to a Philips data centre to function (i.e. the internet needs to work at my house, which isn’t always true thanks to the failings of the Liberal Party).

I’d been meaning to look at the cheapo smart lights from Kmart for a while, and finally got around to it this week. For $15 you can pickup a dimmable white globe, and for $29 you can have a RGB one. That’s heaps cheaper than the Hue options. Even better, the globes are flashable to run the open source Tasmota stack, which means no web services required!

So here are some instructions on flashing these globes to be useful:

Buy the globes. I bought this warm while dimmable and this RBG option.

Flash to tasmota. This was a little bit fiddly, but was mostly about getting the sequence to put the globes into config mode right (turn off for 10 seconds, turn on, turn off, turn on, turn off, turn on). Wait a few seconds and then expect the lamp to blink rapidly indicating its in config mode. For Canberra people I now have a raspberry pi setup to do this easily, so we can run a flashing session sometime if people want.

Configure tasmota. This is really up to you, but the globes need to know local wifi details, where your MQTT server is, and stuff like that.

And then configure Home Assistant. The example of how to do that from my house is on github.