Emil Cheriches digs into LED smart bulbs after having issues with Zigbee radio control.
At our airbnb we have a rather big dining room where I’ve put 7 Zigbee RGBWW Smart bulbs. The problem is that each time I try to turn all 7 on or off there’s either a lag or some of them just won’t switch on or off. The controller is a Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB dongle, yes the one with the antenna. But between these bulbs and the controller is a fairly big distance, one concrete and one stone wall.
So I decided to go back to what I knew and works better, WiFi. And so I ordered a bunch of smart bulbs on AliExpress, on the cheap side. I know these bulbs come with a proprietary firmware that wants to connect to a Chinese cloud so I was sure of flashing them even before the order.
… The bulb is ran by a CB2L Module. The CPU of this module is a BK7231N chip… there’s no IC on the LED board, which means that in the open source firmware there’s no need to load any specific driver, all of the light controls is handled thru PWMs.
See how Emil dug into the bulbs and changed the software in the post here.
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