ZemiSmart Lamps , Tasmota and Retail Therapy

The original of this blog entry has lots of interesting stuff but as I’ve now been through even MORE RGB lamps from various suppliers – this requires an update (June 14, 2020).

Zemismart, as you will see further down, do several decent RGBW lights of the type that offer proper warm and cold white as well as full colour. The first lights of theirs I used were GU10 – six of them in my kitchen in full use under Alexa control – I would not be without them now. Further down in here I covered their MR16 lamps but here I want to cover 2 different designs (visually) of E27 5W lamps they do. No branding other than “Zemismart Smart Bulb RGBCW”. So, I have 3 of these, two are candle shape, the third is flat-topped. In the photos below I deliberately turned the lamps right down to minimise strobing on my phone camera.

So, I set them up using the Smart Life APP – no problem except this means using the CLOUD – and that’s not happening as I need the lamps to run locally. WHY? My broadband is up and down right now and Vodaphone are supposed to be sending a new modem out – some day. This is just one of a series of reminders I’ve had recently to use but NOT RELY on the cloud – any cloud.

So, dead easy – using TUYA-Convert, load up Tasmota onto the lights – except that it wasn’t that easy – firstly the broadband went down while pairing one of the lights – DEAD – so that needed TASMOTIZE to fix and my handy soldering iron. Then – I could find no template on the Blakadder site that would do the job.

https://templates.blakadder.com/

I tried most of the templates – none of them were even remotely good enough for these lamps – then Mr Shark advised me to play with PWM options and I did. I came up with this perfectly fine Tasmota template…

{"NAME":"Zemismart-E27-RGBCW","GPIO":[0,0,255,255,37,40,255,255,38,41,39,255,255],"FLAG":15,"BASE":18}

In case you are unfamiliar with Tasmota JSON templates – these specify what the various GPIO pins do on the ESP8266 chip that runs these and many other (but not all) smart lights. In short – GPIO4 = 37, GPIO5=40, GPIO12=38, GPIO13=41 and GPIO14=39 – those numbers referring to Tasmota PWM settings for the red, green, blue, warm and cold white LEDs respectively.

I’ve loaded this template on the Blackadder site but it hasn’t appeared yet – SO, here’s my contribution. In the WEBUI for Tasmota – simply add the above in the console – save and you are done.

So why these lights? There are many that are not very bright, or huge, or don’t have proper warm and cold whte control etc. These, on the other hand are bright, small and generally good, that’s why. Enjoy – took me all day to get them working so you don’t have to.

Tasmota

I’m currently using version 8.3.1.3 of Tasmota (open-source alternative firmware for ESP8266 processors – keep up!)

In the DEV 8.2.0.5 release we noted changes not necessarily reflected in dev version changes (well, that’s why they are development versions I guess)… As of Monday April 20, 2020, there is a change to button behaviour – with the new SETOPTION73 (abbreviation now available for example SO73) which is now the DEFAULT setting, at least in the current DEV version.. well, check out this example:

Got to the Tasmota DOCS for more on this – the author of these new changes is @effelle#0598 (Federico Leoni) on DISCORD and he’s really helpful. (If you want button operation as before – without these new features, just use setoption13 (SO13) so you only get TOGGLE – nothing else on the button. If you want to have the multipress but no triggering of the relay, use setoption73, or use button 2 to 4 with rules to block unwanted behavior.

It did occur to me that this new Tasmota behaviour might be dangerous in the extreme situation where RELAY1 is a simple light in another room and RELAY2 is an expensive heater in another room, is there a chance of wasted electricity here or am I being over-cautious? I generally prefer one button for one job where possible.

More ZemiSmart Lights

ZemiSmart GU5.3 RGBCCW lights (I’ve always called this type of light MR16 but my MR16 ceiling casings are an impossibly tight fit for the new lamps (springs get in the way). So the new lamps – mine came via Amazon but you can get them directly from ZemiSmart – I converted one to Tasmota and hit an issue with the colour RED (only). I wondered if it was Tasmota so checked out a virgin, unaltered light. Watch this:

"Alexa set smart bulb 8 to red/green/blue"

All the colours respond perfectly except RED which prompts Alexa to ask daft questions like “You have Smart Life enabled, do you want to open it?”. “Alexa, f*** **F” is my now standard response.

The banding in the image above is from my camera, not the lamps – meanwhile, another use for my i.e. holding rather warm lamps while on test. Certainly beats burning my bench 🙂

Something Completely Different

For one fleeting moment I figured I might just support the British economy as I’m always getting samples of lamps from China…. so off I went to Costco (UK store), that famous local company (the lure of an ice-cream helped). After all, if you buy from a British store you don’t get any of those false claims apparently associated with the Chinese, do you?

WRONG!

Rant: So firstly of course we all know Costco isn't British - neither are the lights which are simply imported by the "Costco middle man" from FEIT in California who of course had them made in guess where? China. In future I'm sticking with the direct route. 

Do the British standards stop ridiculous claims like 25,000 hours life? DO they hell. I've yet to see a LED which includes white last anywhere near that long. End of rant.

These “FEIT” lamps want you to use YET ANOTHER CLOUD, but I’m a sharp cookie most of the time and on inspecting them in the store, I checked on my phone to make sure these are covered in the Blakadder site – they LOOKED like they were at first glance. So I expected they’d work with Tasmota – and at 9w they should be reasonably bright.

Importantly the FEIT lamps claim to have full colour temperature control (i.e. warm to cool-white as well as full colour) – take note – 9W means 9W when on WHITE – my guess is the colour LEDs are 3W each – I long for the day someone produces a “9w per colour” light.

Price? Including VAT at Costco – £23.50 for a twin-pack – not MUCH different to current Chinese pricing.

In FACT the Blakadder site templates were NOT for the UK suffix lamps but for the USA/Canada versions – who would have thought the /UK suffix would be so important. After considering cutting my wrists – I got stuck in and looked at other templates. This one in particular- https://templates.blakadder.com/feit_electric-OM60RGBWCAAG.html

It ALMOST worked – but warm and cool white were the wrong way around for my lights which are identified on the packaging as BPA800/RGBW/AG/2/UK

My Tasmota DEV version 8.3.1.2 didn’t even seem to have the right controller so I did the OTA update to 8.3.1.3 – and made only one change to the Blakadder template above – changing PWM2 (38 in the template) to PWM2i (47 in the template).

One working set of Costco FEIT lamps. At the end of all of that – the white (warm and cold) output is great – the RGB intensity is “ok”. The “fade-in” is a bit of a worry – they start at full brilliance for an instance then almost instantly go off and fade back in. But that is minor in the scheme of things.

Enjoy. You have the info – no doubt Blakadder will at some point add this variation to his own site.