Rethinking cloud-only smart bulbs
What I learned when my "smart" lights turned out to depend on someone else's servers.
I'm tying my smart home together with Home Assistant: one dashboard for everything, running on my own server instead of five different companies' apps.
My Wi-Fi bulbs were supposed to support local control. In practice the option never showed up, so they only work by phoning a company's servers. If that company has an outage — or discontinues the product — my lights get dumber.
So I'm deciding between a bridge that lets them talk locally, or swapping them for Zigbee bulbs, which talk straight to a small antenna on my server. No internet required.
Home Assistant Container runs under its own rootless Podman user with host networking. ZHA drives a Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 Dongle Plus V2, passed in by its /dev/serial/by-id path — stable across reboots, unlike /dev/ttyUSB0.
--device /dev/serial/by-id/usb-Itead_Sonoff_Zigbee_3.0_USB_Dongle_Plus_V2_<id>-if00-port0
The Govee A19s never exposed LAN control in the app despite being listed as supported. Options: govee2mqtt (LAN with cloud fallback), or replace them with Zigbee bulbs that pair straight to ZHA — and, as mains-powered devices, extend the mesh.
The principle I'm landing on: local-first control, with the cloud as a nice-to-have.