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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io

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Sengled wifi lightbulbs not keeping color settings? (programming.dev)

submitted 8 months ago by kryllic@programming.dev to c/homeassistant@lemmy.world

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Hey all, hoping I can gain some insight into an issue I'm having with my sengled lightbulbs. Basically I have two scenes set up in HAS, one "default" scene that has all the lights at 100% brightness with soft white and another that is for movies that turns off all the light except two and modifies the color value to be a more orange, and lower brightness.

My issue is when trying to set the default scene, the color values of my pair of lights don't seem to keep the color temperature. The color picker will immediately clear any value I set after 2 seconds, and go back to the previous scene's brightness and color. I can usually go into the sengled app to reset the color to what I want but this is far from ideal.

It's important to note that I'm using the unofficial sengled api addon from HACS and I am not using the zigbee versions of the lightbulbs (I don't have a zigbee-compatible usb stick yet).

Is this an api limitation or something else I'm missing? Would the zigbee versions work better than the WiFi ones? My router is practically right next to the light bulbs so I doubt that's the issue.

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[–] roofuskit@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

Edit: OP isn't using Zigbee but I'm leaving this here

Don't buy SengLED bulbs. I don't know if it's cost cutting or if them believe their own bullshit, but their bulbs don't act as repeaters in a mesh network. Their excuse for the last 10 years is that most people still shut off their smart bulbs at the switch. I don't believe that.

When you populate your network with these you're losing the best repeater placements your setup can have and weakening your mesh network.

[–] limelight79@lemm.ee 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Interesting point. The two I have are in exterior fixtures that are on the other side of the wall from the switch (which is a repeater), so for me this is a non-issue, but I can see if you're using them indoor, it could be a big difference.

If someone can live with this limitation, they have worked fine for me.

[–] roofuskit@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, the ones I have left work fine at the very edge of my network. But I had serious network issues using them throughout the house until I switched to better bulbs that work how Zigbee devices are supposed to.

[–] limelight79@lemm.ee 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

After I posted the above comment, I saw other people claiming they've had issues getting them to display traditional incandescent color values. I have not had that issue with them, either. There was something I had to set in HomeAssistant for the bulbs, I think, perhaps in the color picker UI, to allow the selection of those colors, but once I found that, no issue. I don't think I even had to manually re-pair them when I switched Zigbee channel to avoid my Wifi.

Now that I've said this, one will probably start showing blue instead of white or something, of course.

[–] roofuskit@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

The problems I had were more network related because I didn't have enough repeaters, because I didn't realize SengLED had ignore the Zigbee spec and made their bulbs only endpoints. Once I put other bulbs in that worked properly, the network issues disappeared.

[–] kryllic@programming.dev 3 points 8 months ago

This is still good to know, I didn't know the bulbs were just endpoints, gonna avoid them going forward and find repeater zigbee bulbs instead. Thanks!