Smarty Ninja hasn’t had the opportunity to test Govee products yet, but the company’s range is constantly expanding. Like other Govee devices, the new Matter-enabled lamp uses 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi to work with the Matter protocol. This makes the lamp compatible with Apple Home. The lamp’s LEDs can display any of 16 million colors, as well as multiple colors simultaneously, including warm and cool shades of white.
One of the features of this lamp is the ability to create images in the Govee app, which are then displayed on the device itself. The app also offers many colorful animated presets.
The lamp is equipped with a manual control on the top, which allows you to adjust the brightness and intensity of the colors. In addition, you can switch between standard and animated effects. The light flux mainly comes from the main part of the body, but the lower part of the stand is also illuminated and has a stylish embossed design. The maximum brightness of the lamp is 500 lumens (probably when the cool white color is on), which is standard for a table lamp of this size.
At the moment, the lamp is only available on Amazon in Germany and the UK, but hopefully it will be available in other countries soon.
Today, I want to acquaint you with an intriguing device. It’s a Wi-Fi relay based on the ESP8266 controller, which is why it will be easy to add to your smart home. In the articles on the site, you have already come across devices from other companies that use ESP32\ESP8266 (for example, Sonoff.) ( 1, 2, 3 )
Shelly is a pretty new yet powerful startup from Bulgaria. The company’s devices earn a lot of European and Americal quality certificates, as well as various awards in the smart home field. Shelly has a market on AliExpress and its internet shop with prices in Euros. It has cheap delivery almost worldwide.
Today, this company has a powerful production. Shelly produces a wide range of relays, lighting devices, meters, switches and sockets, wireless buttons, and all kinds of sensors for the smart home.
The hardware part of Shelly 1
You can use Shelly 1 for both remote controlling your outlets and lighting. The advantage here is that you can control the lighting remotely (using an app) and the usual switch simultaneously.
As you can see in the photo, the device is compact. The main task in its development was to make sure that the device fits into an outlet box with an outlet or switch body. Let’s look at how engineers succeeded in this task. Below, there are two outlet boxes for plasterboard, one being deeper.
As you can see, in the first photo with a smaller outlet box, the body of an outlet or a switch will protrude about three to four millimeters. Take this into account when buying electrical before repairs. Also, find a place for wires. I must say, I used a standard outlet. There are also those whose body is slightly distant from the plane of the wall.
If you use switches, pay attention to the flex switch I already wrote about, its interior is very compact, and the switch won’t “look” out of the outlet box.
We see a deeper outlet box in use in the second photo. When using a case of similar size, there shouldn’t be any problems with free space for Shelly 1. Besides, you can place Shelly 1 in a regular mounting box.
One of Shelly 1’s wiring diagrams can be like this:
When mounting, note that the relay of the device can take up to 16A. As you already understood, you don’t need the switch to control the relay. Terminals “0” and “I” are relay outputs, and such contacts are named “dry” sometimes. It is because they don’t connect to the main logic circuit of the device. In theory, you can connect devices with a low supply voltage to such contacts and control the supply of voltage to such devices using Shelly 1. The supply voltage on the Shelly 1 relay should apply to the terminals “L” and “N.”
The device’s power supply voltage range is extreme, from 110V to 240V alternating current or 24-60V direct current. You can also change the power mode using a jumper on the case, and then the power supply voltage will be 12V DC. The jumper is under the plug, and getting to it can be quite hard.
There is a connector nearby where you can download custom firmware for Shelly 1, but I don’t think there’s much point in doing that. The fact is that Shelly allows you to unpair your devices from your cloud and enable local management. Such actions make it possible to control Shelly 1 from alternative smart home management systems, such as Home Assistant. In addition, you can control the relay even from the browser.
Configuring and managing devices in the Shelly app
Firstly, download and install the official Shelly application on your smartphone. Then register your account, which allows you to manage Shelly devices from anywhere in the world where there is access to the network.
To set up and add the device to your home, connect the wires as shown in the photo below.
Once turned on, Shelly 1 will create its Wi-Fi hotspot, and you can now connect and configure your device. To do this, select the “Add device” item in the menu. Once detected, you will see it in the list. Then you can add it to the necessary room or change the picture of the device.
To go to Shelly 1’s settings, click on its image in the “room window.” As you can see, the list of possible parameters is big. We can use the timer and schedule of the device. Below, in the “Cloud” section, we can disconnect the device from the cloud. In the “Settings” section, you will find the settings of Shelly 1 regarding the device behavior after power loss. There are four options for the status after power-on: “on”, “off”. “save state after power consumption”, and “according to the state of the switch”. In my opinion, this is a unique and quite useful feature. In addition, in the settings, there is an opportunity to indicate which switch you will use, keyboard (button, flex), or regular.
It is also interesting that we can choose what our relay will control, for example, an outlet or lighting.
In the settings, we can also reboot the device, remove it or reset it to factory settings.
Shelly 1’s web interface
To access the web interface of Shelly 1, you need to know its IP address. To do this, you can look at the address in the router settings. But, to not do it every time, you should set a static IP address for the device. The interface of the page is a bit like the interface of the application, but in my opinion, a larger computer screen will be more comfortable.
There are even more settings here than in the mobile version. One of the more interesting points in the web interface is the ability to enable and configure MQTT. But you are warned that turning it on will disable the cloud connection, which is not a huge loss when the possibility of controlling the device in alternative smart home systems appears.
Shelly 1 and Home Assistant
As soon as the Shelly device appears on your local network, Home Assistant will immediately “see” it.
All you have to do is confirm the configuration settings and choose a room for the device. By the way, the device that “flies” into Home Assistant is the same device you selected in the Shelly app. Now you can control the device with Home Assistant and the response time is almost instantaneous.
Today you will get to know the Wiz lighting devices, for example, the filamentous (retro-styled) ST64 E27 bulb. The full name is “ST64 E27 WIZ DW FA Q”.
History of Wiz
Wiz was founded in 2017 as a startup, and in 2019 it already became a part of Signify, the world leader in the lighting industry. Signify is also the owner of Philips Hue. Wiz is the IoT platform of solutions for smart lighting. The Wiz ecosystem includes not only software solutions but also cloud features and products. Together with partners, the company offers lighting, devices, and accessories under different brands. Wiz already connected millions of devices in the market.
Unlike Philips Hue, Wiz offers smart lighting based on Wi-Fi, which is then controlled by a very handy app that connects to existing Wi-Fi networks. You don’t need a hub to control the system. The Wiz ecosystem covers more than 60 countries around the world.
Short characteristics and the Wiz ST64 E27
The light bulb is made out of glass, pear-shaped and retro-styled. The filaments are made out of rows of LEDs, that visually copy the filaments of “Edison’s lamp”. The light from such filaments is a nice white warm light with a cool temperature of 2200K. You can control the brightness of the lamp in a branded app. The max brightness of the lamp is 550 lumen, which is the equivalent of a 45W incandescent lamp.
I must say, controlling the brightness of the lamp by third-party dimmers is impossible, I recommend controlling the brightness from the original app only.
The lamp that sells in European shops has a plinth E27 and a voltage of 220-240W. That means using the device in the countries of North America would be impossible. Just as the advertisement booklet is stating, the lamp life is 22 years on the condition of work for 3 hours a day. The device has an energy-saving tier of A+.
Controlling the lamp is possible thanks to the Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11 b/g/n wireless standard with a frequency of 2.4 GHz. It is also possible to control the lamp using voice assistants or alternative smart home control systems.
The Wiz app for light control
First of all, after launching, the app will warn you that all Wiz devices added to your smart home, will only work with 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi networks.
Then you will be offered to create a Wiz account. This will help control your device in the future. If necessary, you can log onto your account using Google or Facebook.
In the settings, you can turn on local device control. This will be required to control lighting using Home Assistant. On the same screen, there is a possibility to turn on third-party integration, for example with Google and Alexa voice assistants.
We can add or change rooms in our smart home and assign smart devices to them.
Adding the lamp isn’t hard, you can just press the correlating button in the menu and choose the way to connect the device. But before that, don’t forget to turn on the lamp. Next, you will need to enter the password to your network so that this way you will save it onto your device.
It can happen if after adding the new lamp in the Wiz app you won’t be able to control it from the app. I don’t know why it happens, but everything works as it should right after relaunching the Wiz app. I could be wrong, but this bug only happens the first time you turn on the lamp after adding. Maybe this is caused by changing the network in the process of adding the device to the Wiz smart home.
So, controlling works now, and you can change the brightness from within the app. In the same app, you can set up scenes and routines for the devices. And if you added voice assistant integration, you can control the lighting using either your voice or the Google Home app.
Making it possible to control Wiz in Home Assistant
In order to control Wiz devices in Home Assistant, you need to enable local communication (Allow Using Communication) in the Wiz app. Also, don’t forget to make the lamp’s IP static in the router settings. Now we’ll go to Home Assistant settings and add the Wiz integration.
Now specify the IP address of your lamp.
If needed, set a correct room for it.
The lamp will be added to Home Assistant, every light bulb in the integration will have three essences, but currently, some of them could be disabled or unavailable. This depends on the scene or the current lamp mode. Of course, the “light” essence must be always available.
For convenience, you can add a card and control lighting from there. And if you already have a working Wiz integration you can add new automatization rules with its participation.
