Recently my bathroom bulb died and as deals do LED bulbs for €1.50 I went to buy one. Next to the regular LED bulbs they had Wifi enabled bulbs and Sockets so I bought one and that’s how I ended up going down the rabbit hole. 

 

 The bulbs /Sockets are by a UK company called Ultrabrite and they have apps in the android and IOS store. It didn’t take long to discover they don’t write their own software. The Software is from a company tuya.com Basically they let companies use their software to create a largely skinned version of their apps.

 

So I found tuya smart, brilliant smart, smart life there’s more. 

They all allow for basic control of the device and some have support for 3rd party control of the aforementioned apps brilliant smart and smart life are the most well connected.  There are 3 main third party controls Alexa, Google home/google assistant and IFTTT, smart life has the greatest number of third party controllers. 

 

Google home seems to offer basic control only. IFTTT is the most interesting as it connects devices from different manufacturers to each other.  IFTTT stands for if this then that.

 

So given condition 1 then have that happen.  without this third party control you are quite limited.  So IFTTT is probably the easiest to connect two unrelated devices.  It still requires your devices to connect to the internet to be monitored and controlled. 

 

IFTTT is apparently going to charge tuya for connecting their devices to their service and so they seem to be removing IFTTT from 3rd party support.  Brilliant which licenses from tuya and IFTTT are retaining support. Smart life which is a Tuya brand also still has it. 

 

Home assistant is an open source platform which runs on linux and seems built with Python3.7  It connects with many devices and services including IFTTT.

 

It Supports Tuya and smartlife but things are a little weird. You can connect with  a tuya account or a smart life account and things get connected mostly.  I thought I had smart life connected with google home. But then i then found I had to use tuya instead… 

 

You can run home assistant on anything really, I put it on an android tv box which boots from sd card debian based as i have it running automatic backups of my other nas i didn’t need a raspberry pi 

 

I kind of got into this for the ability to set colour temperature and brightness.

 

They are smart enough to act as normal bulbs without the wifi control except normal bulbs you can’t set levels and warmth.     

 

I believe the electronics is quite modular so you might enjoy taking one apart. I’m not 100% sure but the bulbs may be getting commands from china possibly via the app. The interesting thing would be if they can be commanded locally.