I’ve been playing around with smart lights for a while now. I have four Edison Smart filament bulbs, two Philips Hue white bulbs and some Switchbot bulb. I had a terrible experience with Switchbot bulbs (which is why I got the Hues in the first place), disconnecting and needing to be re-paired all the time, suddenly factory resetting themselves to max brightness in the middle of the night and such. So the one I kept is just a reading light now with a manual switch on my bedside table.

For the others though, I’ve wanted to have some manual switches for them too in addition to being able to control them through my smartphone. When I get home it’s still quicker to tap a physical switch than to whip up my phone, wait until the respective proprietary app connects to the bulbs and then I get some light.

What I ended up with: a Home Assistant Green with the external USB Zigbee dongle, three IKEA RODRET switches and this blog post. I got those Home Assistant devices because that’s what I could get shipping to Japan, but I believe the Yellow version has Zigbee built in, which should make it a little less clumsy.

RODRET

Since the RODRET is Zigbee compatible, it was smooth sailing. I used a community blueprint for the purpose.

1. add the blueprint to my Home Assistant
2. get the RODRET into pairing mode (which in my case I could do by factory resetting it by pressing the pairing button 4 times quickly, not holding it 10 seconds as the bundled documentation suggests)
3. create automation based on damru’s blueprint for each switch and bulb

Edison Smart

Edison Smart bulbs, as it turns out, are “just” Tuya-based filament lights. To get them into Home Assistant, I had to jump through a few loops.

1. following a guide for a different Edison Smart product, set up a Tuya account with a project
2. install the Smart Life app on my phone and pair all my Edison Smart bulbs with it
3. add the Tuya integration in Home Assistant
4. enter the User Code from the Smart Life app > Settings > Account and Security

Once I did that all the lights automatically showed up in the Home Assistant UI.

Philips Hue

I don’t have (nor do I intend to have) a Philips Bridge. I controlled my two bulbs through the Philips Hue app without creating an account. I could add the bulbs to Home Assistant by resetting them through the Philips app first and then bringing them in range of the Home Assistant’s Zigbee dongle.

Some sources said just unpairing from the app would be sufficient to put the bulbs in pairing mode, but in my case using the “Reset” button on the light’s settings page in the Philips Hue app was necessary. Then the Zigbee integration automatically picked them up and I could uninstall the Philips app too.

Current state of affairs

So now I can control all my lights both from my phone (through the Home Assistant app), from my PC (through the Home Assistant’s browser-based UI) and using the RODRET physical switches. Now this is the kind of convenience I like.