I have a lamp that traditionally has a little finger nub you turn. Off, then low, medium, high, and then goes off again. Family wants to be able to control it thru home automation or specifically Alexa. I was thinking of a wall plug. Normally don’t buy bulbs due to cost. Knowing the lamp can be manually adjusted in brightness thru that switch, is there any way to do this thru home automation with a wall plug or some other method? I would assume the lamp would have to be on all the time and flipped to the highest setting. At a minimum a wall plug would turn it on and off. Wasn’t sure if I could do more.
You could use a Belkin WeMo Mini Wi-Fi Smart Plug
(https://www.cnet.com/reviews/belkin-wemo-mini-wi-fi-smart-plug-review/)
which is ON/OFF only, but can be controlled via WIFI using the “Belko WEMO binding”.
Another option is the Insteon plug, but this requires an additional USB interface.
Search the forum, a lot of options pop up…
I’ve got a similar lamp.
If you want to retain dimming capabilities and/or the 3 levels by touching or turning the knob you would need to deconstruct the lamp and find the input pin going from the knob to the bulb (if there is any, you can’t know until you opened it), then insert some sort of actuator there.
In a nutshell: forget about it, it isn’t worth the risk, cost and effort.
Ahh, so with any of these solutions then once the plug is in line use of the lamp directly won’t work? That’s kind of the case with any of these wall plug solutions I would think no? Probably even replacing the physical wall outlet with smart outlets would have this limitation.
Wasn’t sure if the smart bulb would be an approach that would work with the switch on the lamp and also with OpenHAB even with a higher cost.
I suspect your lamp uses a 3-way bulb, which has two contacts at the bottom of the bulb. as compared to a standard single power output bulb, which only has a single contact at the bottom of the bulb. As @mstormi commented, you would have to open the lamp and trace its wiring. If it is a “normal” 3-way lamp, you could use two controlled relays to connect line power to each of the two contacts at the base of the bulb – as @mstormi said, probably not worth the risk, cost and effort.
@mstormi, @scottk, assuming the bulb were dimmable, would it not work to leave the lamp physically switched to the highest setting and control the brightness through the dimmer built into the wall plug, assuming just dimming were acceptable?
Would the pulsing of the power source to generate the dimming mess up the 3-way?
If the bulb is the type I think it is, that should work just fine. I might be a bit concerned about the plug-in dimmer if the power setting at the lamp is changed, but I suspect that would be OK too.
From my experience with this type of three-way bulb, you can easily replace the three-way bulb with a standard, single power bulb.
Actually, that was one of my unstated assumptions. Were I to try to do this, I might just get a single bulb instead of a 3-way at the max wattage supported by the lamp and adjust brightness solely through the outlet. Of course, this would render the physical lamp switch useless, though some users are OK with that.
Good points all. So I’m buying an Echo Plus 2nd Generation. Comes with a Phillips Hue white bulb and apparently has a Hue Hub built into the Echo to manage it. Discussing elsewhere if that’s accessible by OpenHAB. That said, since it’s “free”, thinking maybe that would work in this case? So put it on max brightness and manage the brightness thru Alexa or OpenHAB if possible?
Only negative from reading, I’m thinking I’d have no ability to control it from OpenHAB. Sounds like Alexa would control it with it’s Zigbee hub or something but may not be accessible outside of it’s ecosystem.
If it’s a true Hue Hub with the Hue API then there is a Hue binding. If not then that wold be correct. I don’t think there is any way to control it from OH. But I don’t use the Alexa bindings so can’t say so definitively.
