Wow! I very much appreciate the time and consideration you put into this very informative response. I gave it some thought after creating the post above and given what I presume must be considered to be an exhaustive list of best case scenario(s) possible outcomes that you kindly provided, I must admit that regardless of need or equipment already in place, simply acquiring the 16.4’ LED strip that Wyze offers or if possible just the controller and/or one that is lightly used is very likely to be the best route forward for me if I am committed to having Music Mode functionality as part of my Color Bulbs’ experience/feature set (which is indeed the case, if that wasn’t already abundantly apparent ). It’s just a shame because not only do I have more LED strip lighting of multiple types than I need in this lifetime but I’ve also got a drawer full of different controllers and Wi-Fi links, etc., several of them containing microphones for this exact purpose. Alas, such is the nature of the beast when buying into a company’s product ecosystem like I/ we have with Wyze and in all honesty, it’s a price I’m willing to pay. There are many manufacturers and brands out there that have similar ecosystems that this would not be the case for. However, I’m still fairly adamant in my support for this company particular that I can still sleep comfortably at night in the rare cases such as this one where I need to make an otherwise unnecessary purchase because of the choice I made to buy into said product ecosystem. Even if full retail price ends up being the best I can do, at $20 it’s hardly worth losing any sleep over and is nothing compared to the cost of entry/involved if you were to be faced with a situation like this with Apple or Samsung or any number of other companies with their own product ecosystems in place.
PS - I know it’s a bit silly for a grown man to be so adamant about such a trivial and superfluous extra feature that arguably has little to no application in an adult male’s life, but ever since the first time I personally witnessed the addition of a visual element to music I was listening to and/or sound present in my immediate environment/proximity, I was hooked. I think the first example of this that I can vividly recall was the WinAmp visualizer that used to be included with Windows Media Player back in the day (it’s probably been at least 20 years since I’ve had a Windows OS on any of my personal machines, so we’re probably talking no later than Win XP/2000/7), which featured “Milkdrops” dancing perfectly in sync with the music playing and which, at that time was almost inconceivably complex and visually satisfying, bordering on addictive. To such an extent that it took concerted effort to separate one’s gaze from the Milkdrop’s rhythmic gyrations. For those interested, if you know what I’m talking about and have similar fond memories of the WinAmp visualizer and aren’t already aware, while the project that brought milkdrop integration to WinAmp was abandoned long ago. It was picked up by some (amazing) folks and open sourced and now exists in the form of a piece of software called ProjectM, which exists for just about every platform and system architecture in existence. Not only did they pick it up, dust it off and give it a new lease on life but they have advanced it well beyond where it had been prior. There are many 3rd party products and services that incorporate ProjectM as a result of it being open sourced, so you may use it without even knowing it (if you use Kodi, specifically the music player and have seen a visualization, that was probably ProjectM. Also as a result of its FOSS nature, while I don’t know exactly how many there are in total at this point there have been countless Milkdrops added in the time the project was resurrected (there’s a zip file linked on the projects GitHub page that I believe has in the neighborhood of 75,000 individual, unique Milkdrops that you can add to the app/program in one fell swoop).
One more option you can look into…there have been people who have reverse engineered the Wyze API to implement it into 3rd party things like Home Assistant, Hubitat, and more.
I do know that people on Home Assistant have done some work to sync LED lights to playing music.
So, if you use the custom API to link your Wyze Bulbs to Home Assistant, then you can use another device with a microphone in Home Assistant, then have the 3rd party plugin use them both together.
In this situation, you can have a type of “Music Mode” on your Wyze Bulbs WITHOUT having to have a Wyze lightstrip controller. And it might be possible for you make all your lights coordinated together that way (not just Wyze, but maybe all your other lightstrips as well so everything is syncronized).
Of course none of that is officially supported by Wyze, but I have played around with linking my Wyze devices through Home Assistant, and others despite them not being official API’s. That is another road you can consider which might cost you nothing extra at all. I even ran Home Assistant on a spare laptop for a while.
Anyway, just another option you can consider, though certainly a bit more complex.
Yes, I remember the WinAmp effects while playing music when I was in college, loved them. I can totally see the appeal of wanting all your lights to do it. I loved that.
Once again, many thanks for the reply and consideration. The last option you provided does sound the most complex but also seems right up my alley. I’m going to do some more digging on this, thanks a lot for the suggestion!
PS - I noticed a notification on my phone stemming from 8db8880d’s comment that has since been deleted so I won’t go into much detail out of respect for his/her wishes but the gist was that Wyze may no longer be Matter compatible. This would surprise me but there was a link posted that did in fact list many companies but Wyze and/or WyzeLabs was no where to be found on the list. Likely just an oversight, no? I can’t imagine Wyze doesn’t have plans to adopt the protocol or software stack or whatever
Well, I deleted my post because it was true…and it wasn’t. They are not listed in “Promoters” or “Adopters,” but are listed in “Participants.” The distinctions are lost to me, but at least their logo is prominently displayed on the Participants page. Good deal!
If you’re interested in Where Wyze stands on the Matter initiative, I would first suggest reading everything WyzeFrederik said in this thread, starting around here:
He gives VERY frank answers about Matter. Better answers than I have seen from any other tech articles or company involved in Matter.
Just 16 days ago, WyzeJasonJ again re-confirmed Wyze is still working on Matter stuff. So it’s safe to say they do have plans to adopt it (or at least hopes/intent depending on where the project heads). There could be logistics issues with Memory or other constraints depending on things like the size of the library required, but they want as many devices as possible to support it. We’ll just have to see how it turns out. The Matter consortium keeps changing the timeline, so our devices are somewhat imprisoned by them until they get their act together, test out the initial launch, make some alterations and then Wyze will have to build out their end of it too. So it will take some time, but they’re definitely still in the game for now.
I have multiple scenes (5-6) for my most commonly used room, and would like to be able to rearrange their order (like you can rearrange device order(. Is this possible? When I add a new scene, it looks like it can only be added to the end, where it is not as convenient to access, as it will require scrolling through the earlier-listed scenes.
(I realize that this could be done by duplicating/overwriting existing scenes, but simply dragging and dropping to a new order would be much easier.)
[Mod Note]:Your topic was merged to this #wishlist request for better visibility and consistency in grouping similar requests.
Not at this time, but it is a common feature request that is being considered.
I merged your topic to this wishlist request that covers additional desired features for Bulb Color. Please remember to scroll up to the top of this topic and click the VOTE button.
Currently bulb scenes are sorted in the order they are saved and cannot be rearranged. A simple ability to drag the scenes in a list to rearrange would be great.
I’m stealing this idea, because I found out that Alexa can schedule reminders for every other week, so now I have an Echo Dot set to talk to a Google Home Mini in order to broadcast a message to the house at the appointed time. (I’m already using weekly Wyze Rules to turn some lights blue for the garbage pick-up.) So far the Alexa reminder works, but it repeats its announcement, so I may change that to have it trigger a Google Home routine instead.
If there is, then I haven’t seen it, which is why I’m trying out the Alexa route. There are at least a couple of topics dedicated to new Rules, so maybe I’ll poke that into a suggestion in one of those:
Not Natively in the Wyze App, no. I do things like this through Home Assistant though.
One other cool automation I made in Home Assistant with my Wyze bulbs is, on holidays, I will have them continually flash between any selection of colors I want at night.
It would be nice if Wyze supported a lot more of those things natively in their own rules engine though…but I’m glad that there are at least some workarounds to be able to do such things, though they can be too complicated for the average person…so hopefully more options come.
Do you know if the HA integration for the bulbs is local?
The one for the normal color bulb definitely is, but for BR30 and White it seems like they do not respond to the local API. Even the wyze app tries but the request fails and then it resorts to the cloud.
I am asking because if you have the bulbs flash like this and they aren’t local, it would be really laggy and probably rate limited by wyze.
I am not sure. Honestly, even the color bulbs I would only call “semi-local”…they definitely respond super fast, BUT if I block my internet or Wyze is having an outage, then they stop responding, so they are still cloud dependent in some way even if they can respond locally to some degree.
I have not tried flashing it for a really long time, so I am not certain. I know Wyze raised their rate limit pretty high after the Home Assistant rate limiting fiasco a few years ago. But I don’t know what it is.
Yea, it’s annoying how they still require a server connection to function. At least with local control you can make them respond faster (when there’s an internet connection).
I am trying to animate and sync all the bulbs for on diffrent brands using HA, but right now the BR30 bulbs are kinda unreliable and laggy compared to the other ones, so local control is a must for a setup like that.
). It’s just a shame because not only do I have more LED strip lighting of multiple types than I need in this lifetime but I’ve also got a drawer full of different controllers and Wi-Fi links, etc., several of them containing microphones for this exact purpose. Alas, such is the nature of the beast when buying into a company’s product ecosystem like I/ we have with Wyze and in all honesty, it’s a price I’m willing to pay. There are many manufacturers and brands out there that have similar ecosystems that this would not be the case for. However, I’m still fairly adamant in my support for this company particular that I can still sleep comfortably at night in the rare cases such as this one where I need to make an otherwise unnecessary purchase because of the choice I made to buy into said product ecosystem. Even if full retail price ends up being the best I can do, at $20 it’s hardly worth losing any sleep over and is nothing compared to the cost of entry/involved if you were to be faced with a situation like this with Apple or Samsung or any number of other companies with their own product ecosystems in place.