ESPMilight Binding, can't get it to work with latest version of Milight Hub

Add-ons Bindings
1

Hi All,

Apologies in advance for the monster post:
TLDR: I cannot control brightness via my MilightHub using Homeassistant Discovery over MQTT.

I have been using mi-lights with sidoh’s Milight-hub for a few years now.
I recently updated the hub to the latest firmware (1.13.0 on Nodemcuv2).

Since then, I cannot get back to my previous working state - I assumed that a simple backup & restore on the hub would give me like-for-like behaviour, unfortunately not.

However, as I much prefer the new UI, I do want to continue with the updated version of the hub.

So, I am trying to start again from scratch, re-pairing, my mi-light devices, and adding them to OH4 using MQTT homeassistant topics.

Some details

OH v4.3.4 on a RPI5 in docker (I do all config via OH UI)
MQTT binding (v4.3.4)
Eclipse-Mosquitto latest (2.0.21) in docker
Milight hub (link) running latest firmware 1.13
Milight LED controllers:

  • LS2 - controlling Cold / Warm white led strips.
  • FUT037W - controlling Cold / Warm white led strips.

What I have done so far:

Configured milight hub following these guidelines: link

Added new FUT091 remote in MilightHub UI, and paired it with one of my led controllers (FUT037W).

I can control all aspects of the leds perfectly, On/Off, Dim and Color temperature from MilightHub

  • I see these updates in the “sniffer” of the milight hub
    In the Milight hub sniffer, I see this:
	Device ID:1234
	Group ID: 1
	Remote Type: fut091
	Packet: 00 DC DD D1 63 CD EA 66 12
	State:
	{
	  "state": "ON",
	  "color_mode": "color_temp",
	  "level": 45,
	  "kelvin": 51
	}
	Command:
	  brightness: 115
  • I see these updates in MQTT Explorer under the homeasssitant topic and also under the relevant milight topic.
	milight
	status = connected
	 states
	  0x4D2
	   fut091
		1 = {"state":"ON","level":66,"color_temp":264,"bulb_mode":"white"}
	 commands
	  0x4D2
	   fut091
		1 = {"state":"OFF"}

e.g.: If I change the brightness of the bulbs, I see the “level” change above in MQTT Explorer.

Now, over to openhab

Milight-hub is added to the inbox via Homeassistant discovery, containg 3 channels
Color Temperature
Lighting Effect
On/Off State

I then add link to each channel, using “create a new item”

  • On/Off State
    type Switch
    profile Default
    This works perfectly, I can control the on/off of my lights, and the openhab switch also reacts to changes via MilightHub.
  • Color Temperature
    Type Number
    Dimension Temperature (°C) - Not sure why Openhab thinks this is degrees C, so I change this to none
    Unit °C - Ditto
    profile Default
    This works partially,
    if I change the color temperature in MilightHub, I can see the number value in OH change (the range is 153 - 370)
    If I change the color temperature via script (Send command 370 to item), I can see it in explorer
commands
 0x4D2
   fut091
    1 = {"state":"ON","color_temp":350}

However, I cannot change this number via the item in the UI, if I try to change the type to “Dimmer”, I get “Communication error” in red at bottom of the screen, but nothing shows in the logs.
Is there a way to change the control to something human usable?

  • Lighting effect
    I am not interested in this one, this is presets for white light, disco mode etc.
  • Regarding brightness, I do not have a channel for this
    I really want to control the brightness of the leds, why is this channel not created as part of the Homeassistant discovery?
    Is there a workaround to add a new channel under the same milight-hub?
2

Hi again,

Update: After doing some more digging on Home Assistant discovery.
This seems to be controlled by the MiLight-Hub (this makes sense).

So, I looked at the code, and saw this comment:

  // should only have brightness in this list if there are no other color modes
  // https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/light.mqtt/#supported_color_modes
  if (colorModes.size() == 0) {
    colorModes.add(F("brightness"));
  }

So, this looks to be by design, I cannot have color temperature and brightness as 2 separate channels (don’t understand why TBH).
I know sometimes the color temperature channel has 3 figures (e.g. 1,1,1) with the 3rd digit being the brightness, but this is not the case for me.

So, it looks like I need to go fully manual (urghh), or I start tweaking the above code and compiling.