Okay this sounds overly simple, but it's an honest question.
When I jumped into Home Automation I was intimidated by hubs and the prices they demanded. I have taken the plunge and have Hubitat and Smartthings at this point and love what I've been able to do with Hubitat. But now I'm wondering what to do with all these Wifi bulbs I have cluttering my home. I don't want to just get rid of them, but I do know they will be replaced with different products when the time comes. There are really only a few areas that RGB even gets used regularly, so simple Sengled bulbs will slowly take over... I think. But before that time comes around I was researching flashing the bulbs just for the "experience" of doing it... but what would I accomplish besides learning it.
Sell me on the reasons to flash these bulbs. I already know it would take them off cloud services, but is that alone worth the headache? What's the chances of irritating my wife? Are there any other benefits? Just curious. I'll likely flash at least one to see how it's done and what differences it makes, but I want to hear from this level headed community.
Getting them off the cloud and keep everything local is pretty much the only reason to flash them. By taking them off the cloud, you will also gain reliability and shorter delays when executing commands to them.
I think that this reason alone would be a determining factor. As for the WAF, doing this can only be benificial IMHO.
Are there other benefits, I have no idea, I do have a couple of Costco WIFI dimmers that I could flash and use, but since I don't need them for now, I did not research other benefits.
But for sure they are most likely keeping tabs on everything you do when you use there connected products and selling this info to others that want this info, in this day and age, information on clients/people is worth more than gold.
I have 10 color bulbs flashed with Tasmota, here are other benefits:
Using the app Hubitat Tasmota device manager, HE will instantly know the state of the bulbs (on/off, dimmer level, color, etc). Since HE knows the current state of the bulb, they are much easier to then integrate into rules, as well as have the dashboards accurately reflect the state of things.
A Tasmota feature lets you group bulbs together, and sync their state. They sync very fast, and have less of a 'popcorn' effect when changing multiple bulbs to the same setting (when done with a rule or an app) As an example, I have three color bulbs in a ceiling fan. I have rules that will change the color or brightness, and I only update one bulb in the rule. With them grouped together, all three change, and change very fast.
This does take some effort, but for me it was way worth it.
Google Tuya Convert, If the current firmware is older, you can over the air convert these, from a Raspberry Pi or older laptop with Kali Linux on it.
