IoT: More fucking Xmas Lights
On our way out to my nephew’s birthday barbecue, we figured we’d stop in at Big W in Ballarat and see if they had any Christmas stuff out, as they tend to have more of a selection than our local K-mart. Well, not this one… the selection was useless and Sabriena came away empty-handed (I stayed in the car with Beanie).
So she decided to mail order some lights similar to the last ones we bought, only purporting to be RGB, since we couldn’t buy them in-person. They arrived a couple weeks ago, and I’ve been dicking with them since. They’re Mirabella Genio Wi-Fi 200 LED Colour Wheel Fairy Lights (what a mouthful). The density sucks a bit (200 lights over 20M, so 10cm per bulb), but will they do the job? We’re envisioning putting a set or two up in the window with purples, greens, and oranges for Halloween, and leaving the same set up there through January for Christmas. It could be beautiful!
… or not, they’re pretty disappointing to be honest. Yes they’re “colour wheel” (RGB LEDs driven by HSV values) but only if you want them all the same colour. Poking at the data points with some python, it takes color settings in RGB hex triplets, but flatly rejects anything outside the seven colors it defaults to. Why?!
Worse still, I had a lot of grief making the colour wheel part work with Home Assistant. It seems the localtuya module makes a lot of assumptions about the devices, and Tuya’s partners seem bound and determined to manufacture devices that violate those assumptions.
After a week of screwing around with them (not the whole week, mind you, just an hour here an hour there), I managed to figure out how I can make it work well-enough, and left my findings in a bug report I’d started last week.
The TL;DR is that if you set the “colour” datapoint, it assumes brightness is available, but there is no brightness datapoint on this device, and the way it acts dives between all the possible code paths to derive the brightness like it’s in an early-2000s gun-kata bullet-time movie. Setting the colour-mode datapoint to what’s really more correctly the scene-select DP fixes this well enough for my liking, and I can use custom cards for the rest of it.
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