Edison bulbs are filament based. Raising the temperature of tungsten wire to give out heat (mostly) and some light isn’t the most energy-friendly approach. Superseded by energy-saving LED technology, modern light bulbs made its way to our homes. What if you feel particularly nostalgic and you don’t want a perfectly diffused array of LED lights? You can take a look at OEEONE ZigBee lightbulb – which imitates tungsten filament with LED one instead. This one is packed with ZigBee to meed your smart home needs.
Is it really a smart light?
I promptly removed OEEONE ZigBee lightbulb to perform the visual inspection, as I always do when I get a shiny new gadget (pun!). What? This ain’t no smart bulb! It’s just a normal LED filament glass E27 light. For a second there I thought I had been given potato, but a closer look at the fitting revealed the smallest PCB I have seen on lightbulbs. Fine, I’m not conned, this light has smarts.
I must have misplaced the manual during my move to a bigger office. I knew from the Amazon listing this bulb is compatible with HomeKit, Hue and other ZigBee merchants of automation doom. With the knowledge of past devices, I had to find the lucky numbers of toggles it takes to put the OEEONE ZigBee lightbulb into a pairing mode – 7 the lucky number of ON|OFF is 7 (starting from ON position).
I don’t use Hue or HomeKit so Tuya ZigBee bridge was the closest thing I could test this on. The bulb added quickly (to my surprise as a filament bulb!) but I wasn’t able to control it at first. Some troubleshooting and one re-pairing procedure later, I was switching the light on and off and changing the brightness left, right and centre. Awesome.
ZigBee for the win
Here where things get really interesting. With Google and Apple jumping on the ZigBee alliance, it seems that wars of ecosystems are almost over. The dreams of a compatible protocol that every smart tech vendors are closer, and I can’t contain my excitement for this to finally happen. OEEONE ZigBee lightbulb is a bulb you can use with pretty much anything that supports ZigBee 3.0 lights. No hacks, no complicated guides, just plug and play.
OEEONE ZigBee lightbulb
It’s rare to see smart lightbulbs with a glass dome. Years off burning my fingertips on a traditional, tungsten-based filament taught me to keep my fingers away from anything that is bright and made of glass. Touching the bulb set at 100% brightness feels out of place, as the glass is warm to hand, but never burning.
The brightness range is pretty great too. Set the OEEONE ZigBee lightbulb to the minimal brightness and you the light source does a great job at imitating the glow from a bamboo filament bulbs produced over a 100 years ago. Crank it up to 100% and room fills with light, and the bulb is uncomfortable to look at.
What gives it away is the colour. At warm temperatures, the vintage look is real and compelling but set the temperature to cold white and lower the brightness and suddenly something looks out of sight. Edison type bulbs should never give the light this cold, and yet…
Apps: Tuya/IKEA
It’s a ZigBee lightbulb. You have the freedom to pick your own ecosystem, and chances are the bulb will show up as smart light. In my experiments, OEEONE ZigBee lightbulb worked with Tuya ecosystem with Tuya ZigBee kit (review) but I was also able to pair it with IKEA gadgets. The IKEA TRADFRI hub wasn’t playing nice, which sentiment to how useless it is, but IKEA Dimmer paired without any issues!
The smart options will depend on the app you use. In Tuya, there are toggles, colour temperature, brightness and schedules. All that is topped by a local automation panel where you can link the bulb with other gadgets, and the usual voice control for Alexa and Google Assistant skills.
Let’s NodeRED it
Let’s face it. You knew I would be more interested in adding this to my NodeRED than anything else. Linking the bulb to CC2531 or similar isn’t complicated. Everything was pretty much plugged and play as soon as I used a USB stick with the correct level of firmware on it. If the bulb isn’t detected in the pairing mode – take a look at firmware updates!
I already have the ZigBee pairing guide if you are interested and flashing guide to CC2531 if this is your first venture into ZigBee in NodeRED. If you are new and want to give it a go, I also have a 7 part tutorial series for beginners.
Once paired, the device is supported by default, so there is no messing with the driver for it. You have full control over toggle, brightness and colour temperature. Just remember to set correct topics and payloads.
Receiving updates:
topic: "zigbee2mqtt/device_name"
payload sample: {"state":"ON","brightness":254,"color_temp":500,"linkquality":86}Sending commands
topic: topic: "zigbee2mqtt/device_name/set"
//toggle ON, OFF, TOGGLE
Payload: {"state":"OFF","brightness":255}
//brightness 0-255
Payload: {"brightness":255}
//colour temperature 0-100% cold->warm
Payload: {"color_temp_percent": 1}
What’s really hidden, is the fact that you can actually send the colour temperature with 0-100%. Previously, I had to write a small equation to map Kelvin range 2700-6500 to a Mired scale 153-500:
var color = msg.payload -2700;
var warm =153;
var cold =500;
var minK = 2700;
var maxK = 6500;
var range = cold - warm;
var rangeK = maxK - minK;
msg.payload = cold - Math.round((range*color)/rangeK);
return msg;Now I can simply use per cent values to change the colour temperature, which is so much easier to deal with. You can import the sample controls from the JSON below:
Final thoughts
I love Yeelight products for their API. Introducing a common protocol, OEEONE ZigBee lightbulb takes advantage of that and offers a great smart product spiced up with nostalgia for Edison style look. At £18, the bulb isn’t very expensive and it’s the compatibility between different platforms is what makes this bulb so attractive. Plus let’s face it. It does look really cool when set to low brightness. What do you think? Let me know in this Reddit thread.
