HomeAssistant

Integrating with HomeAssistant

The easiest and probably best way to integrate with HomeAssistant is to use the builtin mqtt_json component. The advantages of this approach are:

• Very minimal HASS config.
• Super low latency because all communication is happening over pre-established TCP connections. You can expect lights to react to changes in HASS within 10-100ms.

Prerequisites

• MQTT server. HASS' embedded MQTT server probably works just fine.

Configuration

esp8266_milight_hub

You will need to set the following properties in the UI:

• mqtt_server - can be an IP or hostname. Specify the port here (e.g., mymqttserver.com:1234) if it's not the default (1883).
• mqtt_username / mqtt_password - if you have auth enabled on your MQTT server.
• mqtt_topic_pattern - set this to milight/:device_id/:device_type/:group_id.
• mqtt_update_topic_pattern - set this to milight/updates/:device_id/:device_type/:group_id.

HASS

You'll need a HASS config for each device ID / group you want to control. Fortunately we can leverage YAML anchors to avoid repeating ourselves too much.

Note that device IDs should be specified in hex (e.g., 0xF instead of 15).

light: 
  - name: "Milight Lamp #1"
    # The command topic is derived by substituting real values for the
    # tokens in the setting mqtt_topic_pattern (e.g., "rgb_cct" for
    # ":device_type"):
    #                        ______________ Device ID
    #                       |      ________ Device Type
    #                       |     |     ___ Group ID
    #                       |     |    |
    #                       v     v    v
    command_topic: milight/0x1/rgb_cct/1

    # This is the same structure as above, but for the setting
    # mqtt_update_topic_pattern. esp8266_milight_hub sends state updates
    # to this topic.
    state_topic: milight/updates/0x1/rgb_cct/1

    # Use a YAML anchor for common settings so we can just reference
    # them for other lights.
    <<: &MILIGHT_PARAMS
      platform: mqtt_json
      color_temp: true
      rgb: true
      brightness: true

  - name: "Milight Lamp #2"
    # Only difference here is we're using the group ID "2" instead of "1".
    command_topic: milight/0x1/rgb_cct/2
    state_topic: milight/updates/0x1/rgb_cct/2

    # Reference YAML anchor defined above.
    <<: *MILIGHT_PARAMS

  - name: "Milight RGBW Bulbs"
    # Note here that we're using the "rgbw" bulb type instead of "rgb_cct".
    command_topic: milight/0x1/rgbw/1
    state_topic: milight/updates/0x1/rgbw/1
    <<: *MILIGHT_PARAMS