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Reusing Old Smart bulbs

Intro
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Around five years ago I purchased some smart light bulbs. They are designed to be used with a smart hub, one of these. Turns out that the company behind this has made a new version of the hub, the miboxer , which is not backwards compatible with the older bulbs. It also requires an android app with a cloud account with rather dubious permission requirements to use.

I’m not a fan of this kind of behaviour from companies and would rather reuse things where possible. With this in mind I set out to do some reverse engineering. A few seconds later I discovered this awesome project from Christopher Mullins. I love the Internet.

So, with lots of time saved, I set out to build a replacement hub for my smart bulbs.

The Shopping List
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| Item                         | Cost |
| ---------------------------- | ---- |
| ESP8266 NodeMCU CP2102       | £3   |
| NRF24L01+PA+LNA RF           | £2   |
| Dupont Female to Female Wire | £0   |

Ebay or Amazon have both the NodeMCUv2 and radio. I happened to have the dupont wire already.

nodemcu

Plugging it all in
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This guide details how to connect an NRF24 to an ESP8266

NodeMCU Radio Color
GND GND Black
3V3 VCC Red
D2 (GPIO4) CE Orange
D8 (GPIO15) CSN/CS Yellow
D5 (GPIO14) SCK Green
D7 (GPIO13) MOSI Blue
D6 (GPIO12) MISO Violet

assembled hub

Prepare for installation
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I’m using a mac with homebrew, so the below steps assume familarity with the terminal and homebrew

brew tap homebrew/cask-drivers
brew install --cask silicon-labs-vcp-driver
brew install gettext
brew link gettext --force

Install the project
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git clone https://github.com/sidoh/esp8266_milight_hub.git
cd esp8266_milight_hub

At this point I plugged the esp8266 into my laptop in preparation for installation.

export ESP_BOARD=nodemcuv2
platformio run -e $ESP_BOARD --target upload

The output if successful looks like this:

A successful install

Adding to my WiFi network
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This was pretty simple, just bare in mind that the NodeMCU only supports 2.4Ghz. The project readme has more information on how to configure this.

Pairing a light
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This works the similarily to the official smarthub - hit the pair button in the web UI within a few seconds of turning on the light and your done.

Using the REST API
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An example of using the rest API with curl to turn on a light:

 curl --request POST --header "Content-Type: application/json" --data '{
"state": "On"}' http://192.168.0.18/gateways/0x1/rgb_cct/0

Next Steps
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  • Design and print a box
  • Integrate with Home Assistant
  • Make a nice friendly android app to control my lights