A ZemiSmart Weekend

Today, I received a shipment of goods from ZemiSmart including a small but surprisingly bright 5W E27 RGBW Smart Bulb, a WiFi Smart Socket (max load 16A – 1875W (non-inductive)) with twin USB (5v@2A) and a really neat battery-free (yes, battery-free bell-push) Smart Doorbell.

The WiFi Smart Bulb

Well, I just fell in love with it immediately. I’ started by playing with the Smartlife APP controls. White colour temperature, full colour control, intensity, scheduling, timeout – it’s all there and the colours are quite bright for a “5W” lamp. Claimed life is 50,000 hours (of course I love you).

A visit to MACVENDORS.COM confirmed that this device IS based on an ESP8266 and hence can run Tasmota for those like myself and others adverse to relying on the cloud.

SO my next job was to run the Tuya-convert software up on my Raspberry-Pi/Wemos combo covered elsewhere – flick the light on and off quickly until it flashed – and program Tasmota into it wirelessly. Great but no control – then I realise there was no template for this light. But looking here – Ihttps://templates.blakadder.com/bulb-type.html I went through the templates and found a section on RGBCCT (i.e. colour temperature as well as RGB) and almost at random picked the Teckin SB53 template – back to the lamp web interface – plugged that into CONFIGURE – OTHER – pasted in the SB53 template, ticking the ACTIVATE box – and it WORKED. Lovely. Bear in mind that like many modern lights (but not by ANY means all) – the colour combinations are created not just by mixing R, G and B, but also by mixing warm white (say, 2700k) and cold white (say 6400k) LEDs. The result is excellent.

Now, if someone would just include yellow LEDs, life would be perfect – I can’t be the only one who’s notuced that yellow created from green and red often seems to have a greenish tinge to it. WS2821 LEDs are a prime example- especially at low intensity level. Anyway, this lamp is pretty good overall – so much so that it is my bed reading light.

The UK WiFi Smart Plug with twin USB

Another visit to MACVENSORS.COM confirmed this is smart plug is NOT based on an ESP8266 chip and hence CANNOT run Tasmota. Using the Smartlife APP, this unit has a button bottom-front to turn it on or off. This turns on and off the mains outlet AND the twin USBs at the same time, while on the APP you control mains power and USB separately.

Note the width of the smart plug – this does NOT take up 2 sockets as some do – and that’s nice – on the other hand if you have mains sockets too near the floor, you might not be able to fit this device without using a block. See photo.

You also have separate timeout and schedule controls for USB and mains power in the APP. The USB sockets do not light up separately. On the APP, device information (unlike some other devices I’ve seen) gives you the IP and MAC addresses for the plug along with timezone and signal strength. What I don’t like about this unit, aside from inability to Tasmotise it – is that on power cycling, it defaults to OFF, so if you had one of these controlling a small (1KW) heater, you might come home to find a cold room. That’s just daft.

Third party controls include Alexa, Google Assistant, IFTT, Tsmall Genie, DuerOS and Rokid (I’d never heard of the last three either).

NOTE – 1 year later: It is now December 2021 – the socket has been out of use for a year or so thanks to Covid. I tried pairing it to the Smart Life App and on the second attempt it worked. Howevre it has no inching and no what to know lighting up time, the timer being a simple 24-hour job. Worse, it definitely reverts to power off after power cycling with no way to alter that behaviour.

The Battery-Free Wireless Doorbell

Lovely. Standard, small, plug-in-the-wall bell with 48 sounds, a few of which are speech, sadly in the wrong language, the one most of us here don’t understand, but the tunes are nice. More’s the point, the actual door push is kinetic, i.e. no batteries – and that’s a good thing. I have a kinetic hallway light switch – and unlike most cheap piezo fire starters, these do seem reliable with a claimed life of 20,000 operations and operating range of -25c to +50c (just as well, I will take this to Spain when we can get to Dover, on a ship then all the way down through Spain).

The doorbell and bell push arrived pre-synced, all ready to go straight out of the box, The bell has 2 buttons, one for volume, the other to select tunes. The bell push comes complete with adhesive pad. You also get a somewhat daft “Please ring the doorbell” sticker – too big to fit on the button.

The doorbell product claims to be eco-friendly, range 30-50 metres, door push dimensions 70mm dia x 15.5mm high, doorbell dimensions 94 x 53 x 34mm. 15 months later the bell is working just fine over in Spain.