The "new" Milight IBox and milight binding

Add-ons Bindings
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Hi everyone

Though I’d share something I recently got working…

I have three MiLight V3 bridges (the older square ones) all-together supporting about 10 zones in my house. I’ve invested quite a lot into MiLights and must say they work almost as good as my Hue bulbs, but at a fraction of the cost. So recently I ran across an ESP8266 enabled bridge (link) that replaces the MiLight’s ones. This a fantastic prospect as the normal bridges has a limited range whereas the RF chip for this project comes with an external antenna which I’ve had working throughout my house! It also means you only have to look after one “bridge”.

So for those interested, after you got the hardware and connected everything together (really simple to do), you configure as many virtual gateways as you want. The project includes a “sniffer” mode which you can use to identify your existing gateway’s IDs, i.e. the ID to which bulbs subscribe when you initially linked them up. Using this sniffer it relatively easy to create the virtual gateways and means that your existing bulbs remain exactly as-is, no reconfiguration needed!

The only caveat is to ensure that you configure the OH2 MiLight binding with the correct thing type. I used to use the rgbLed, but with the virtual gateway I simulate a V6 bridge and for this I use the V6 Milight binding’s channel and the rgbwLed thing. This combination works like a charm.

Here’s an example of the gateway configuration:

image

And for OH’s MiLight binding (note the IPs are the same, i.e. only one physical device now :slight_smile:)

Bridge milight:bridgeV6:000000005E4D [ADDR="10.0.0.208", ID="000000005E4D", CUSTOM_PORT=3389] {
        Thing   rgbwLed          1
        Thing   rgbwLed          2
        Thing   rgbwLed          3
        Thing   rgbwLed          4
}

Bridge milight:bridgeV6:000000007B89 [ ADDR="10.0.0.208", ID="000000007B89" , CUSTOM_PORT=3390] {   
        Thing   rgbwLed          1
        Thing   rgbwLed          2
        Thing   rgbwLed          3
        Thing   rgbwLed          4
}

Bridge milight:bridgeV6:00000000F82A [ ADDR="10.0.0.208", ID="00000000F82A" , CUSTOM_PORT=3391] {
        Thing   rgbwLed          1
        Thing   rgbwLed          2
        Thing   rgbwLed          3
        Thing   rgbwLed          4
}

The remainder of OH’s configuration is as per usual.

There’s another post on the forum explaining how to use MQTT to achieve something similar, but in my case I wanted all my lights represented by a single “color” item and not discrete controls. If you want to have a look see here.

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