I have to say this one caught me completely off-guard. The light turned up today – pretty box and very nice looking lamp though it looked small enough to be not that bright – wrong!
The box says “Protocols: Thread, Zigbee, Bluetooth”. As I’m not into Bluetooth and know zilch about Thread, I went for Zigbee.
I plugged the light into power and turned it on – it started to undulate brilliance as you;d expect for an un-paired device. So off I went to my Zigbee2mqtt controls in Home Assistant and simply hit the button to add new devices. I’ve done it a thousand times – at least.
“Imagine my surprise” when nothing happened. The first thing that crossed my mind was “What are Aqara doing bringing out a Zigbee lamp that won’t work with Zigbee2MQTT?”.
Once I got over that shock – I looked at the tiny sheet that comes with the lamp and saw – guess what – a MATTER QR CODE.
I went into my Google Home app and tried adding a new Matter compatible device – not really expecting it to work – but it DID. For want of a better name, having read the box and initially failing to find the model number, I called the lamp “Ampoule-LED”. And it worked – no problem – on and off in the Google Home app. No controls to set up power-fail recovery so I turned on the lamp and cut the power – when I reconnected the power – the lamp was on. Great.
Next – the Home Assistant challenge. I went into Home Assistant – to my HA Google Home integration and told it to add a device. That sent me off back to the actual Google Home app. I had to tell it what linked sevice should be added to the lamp.. Home Assistant – easy. Back to Home Assistant – added – no problem – but once again with a ridiculous name… I don’t understand why the names don’t transfer over to HA.. and there it was — “LED Bulb T2” complete with 7 entities. I’ve been down this road with Sonoff – you have to rename the device and THEN rename the entities – but in the end it’s easy – so I’m going to call it “aqara-lb-102e” because I can – and with that – in the clipboard…
Simply a matter of using the PASTE on the PC (in the device settings cog) to change the part of each of those entities above to “aqara_lb_102e” for example:
And that actually took far longer to write about than actually DO. So now I have my sparkly new BRIGHT bulb all ready to add to my dashboard. Very bright and quite WARM, too. I suspect the Thread part is coming into play here as I happen to be running an Aqara Hub 3 which is apparently a Thread Border router – some day I’ll follow that exactly.. but it works. Why not Zigbee2MQTT is a question I’ve fired back at Aqara.
I do like the slow on-off – takes maybe a second to transition – and I love it that you can control transitions time and brightness as well as colour temperature from Home Assistant. A reminder of times gone by. Very smooth. A nice lamp.