esphome-yeelight_bs2

Warning: this code is still under heavy development

This code is not yet production-ready. Most of the work goes into reverse engineering the original firmware and coming up with ways to re-implement a device firmware based on ESPHome.

The main focus for now lies on driving the LED circuitry, to make sure that the light quality meets that of the original firmware. While I thought this would be the easy part, it turned out to be quite a beast, since driving the LEDs is quite different from a regular RGBWW-style light.

The light functionality is getting close to completion. After this, I will work on implementing the front panel buttons. The hard work for this was already done: reverse engineering the protocol that is used to talk to the main board. Therefore, finishing up the firmware should not take much time once I get to this point.

With those two out of the way, we can move towards a stable release of the firmware. I have some more ideas to work on, but those can and will be extensions to the stable release code.

Is it safe to install this firmware on my device?

As long as you keep a backup of the original Yeelight firmware, this is quite safe :-)

I have two lamps that both are running the latest development firmware and they are functioning very well as far as the light feature is concerned. I sometimes see API disconnection issues, but those can all be traced back to the underlying frameworks. For the most prevalent issue, I did some debugging and wrote a fix (it is mentioned below).

For each commit of the code, I will do my best to commit it in a working state. Once a first completed stable release is cooked up, I will tag production releases of the code to make it easier to pick the safe version for production purposes.

Installation

Create a folder named custom_components in the folder where your device's yaml configuration file is stored. Then clone the the Github repo into a subfolder yeelight_bs2. For example on the command line:

# mkdir custom_components
# cd custom_components
# git clone https://github.com/mmakaay/esphome-yeelight_bs2 yeelight_bs2

Your folder structure should now look like:

config
├── yourdevice.yaml
├── custom_components/
│   ├── yeelight_bs2/
│   .   ├── README.md
.   .   ├── yeelight_bs2_light_output.h
.   .   .

Then add the required configuration to your device's yaml configuration file. For an example file, take a look at doc/example.yaml in this repository.

On a Rapsbery Pi with HomeAssistant and ESPHome as a plugin, the directory should be:

/config/esphome/custom_components/yeelight_bs2/

config
├── epshome
│   ├── yourdevice.yaml
│   ├── custom_components/
|   .   ├── yeelight_bs2/
│   .   .    ├── README.md
.   .   .    ├── yeelight_bs2_light_output.h
.   .   .    .

See doc/FLASHING.md for hints for opening and flashing the light.

Issue: the device keeps losing its connection to Home Assistant

This is not a problem with the device or the custom firmware, but a problem in the upstream library "AsyncTCP". I did identify the issue and have a proposed fix for it. The issue was reported at:

https://github.com/me-no-dev/AsyncTCP/issues/116

If you want to try out this change, then create a libs folder in the folder where your device's yaml configuration file is stored, and clone the following repository into that folder:

https://github.com/mmakaay/AsyncTCP

For example on the command line:

# mkdir libs
# cd libs
# git clone://github.com/mmakaay/AsyncTCP

Then add a pointer to this folder from within your device's yaml configuration file, using the lib_extra_dirs option. Provide it with the absolute path to your libs folder. The relevant part of the config change looks like this:

esphome:
  platformio_options:
    lib_extra_dirs: /config/libs

This way, the repository version of the library will override the version of the library that is bundled with ESPHome. Build the device firmware and flash the device like you would normally do.