I’m completely out of the smart lights loop and I’m looking for light bulbs that allow me to set brightness, color temperature and possibly the color in general using HA.
I see a lot of people recommending zigbee bulbs, which is fine, I just need to buy a dongle, but I already have an isolated wifi network with no internet access that I use to control smart stuff from my home server, so something with wifi would be ideal. I want something that I can just screw in and control from my server with no proprietary apps needed for the initial configuration.
Can you give me some recommendations?
Thanks
The reason people suggest avoiding wifi is more than just having the isolated network. Between the protocol requirements, the possibility of network congestion, and the high probability of overlapping wifi network signals, it can make them unreliable or just a bit slower than you’d expect a light to work.
Thread enabled devices can make this better, apparently; if I was in the market for bulbs outside of my current zigbee setup I would want Thread. Zigbee is excellent so far for me
Personally, I’m very happy with my Hue lights, but not super happy with the price; I only get them on sale. One aspect that is not discussed enough, in my opinion, is the quality of light (CRI, dimming depth, colour intensity), which hue is great at imho. The new hub does some nerdy stuff for motion detection if you have multiple bulbs in a room which is interesting, though I haven’t looked into it much.
Trying to build a Thread network today is a waste of money, sadly. There’s not enough competition there and prices are much worse than Zigbee,
Ikea’s line of matter bulbs and devices are showing up in stores now.
Good quality firmware and electronics at close to aliexpress prices.
Yeah, it’s not really built out yet. Zigbee is good enough, thread is supposed to make it better but I’m good with what I’ve got in hue - for now at least.
Isn’t IKEA’s new line thread?