Purchased 18 "Bulb Colors" and I'm honestly disappointed. Hoping for some insights

Power & Lighting
, ,
1

As the title says, I bought 18 of the “Bulb Color” from Wyze. I was replacing my Hue setup, and I was excited because the color saturation and brightness of these new bulbs are definitely superior to what Hue has to offer. However, when it comes to control, the Bulb Color is frankly dead in the water. As far as I can tell, the only existing control methods are the following;

  • Through the Wyze app, where you can manually control individual bulbs and set their colors. There is some rudimentary scene and grouping functionality here as well.

  • Via Alexa or Google Assistant- I’ve found this to be a laborious process to set up, and it’s difficult to know what voice commands to use. In addition, I don’t enjoy shouting at my smart speaker 150 times a day to operate the lights in my home.

  • Through IFTTT- A third party subscription service which I’ll need to pay for if I want the necessary features.

  • Via a wall switch- I can turn them on and off by physically cutting power to the bulbs. This defeats the purpose of smart bulbs almost entirely.

  • Via Wyze Rules- extremely limited functionality. No option to automate color in any way whatsoever. No timers, no scheduled scenes, no ramped start-up/shutdown. You can set them to turn “On” at a specific brightness and shade of white at a specific time, and that is it.

There is, as far as I can tell, no hardware control option. No geofencing functionality that I can find. I tried using one in conjunction with my Wyze Cam V3, and set a rule to turn on when motion is detected, and then a separate rule to turn off if the bulb has been on for 5 minutes. This created an endless feedback loop. The camera would detect motion, triggering the light. When the light turned off in 5 minutes, the camera would register this as motion as well, triggering the light… Etc. The Wyze home screen widget for Android just lists the devices- you can’t control them outside of the Wyze app itself.

Overall I’m feeling rather dejected as I’d hoped these would be a viable alternative to the Hue system. It seems the competitions’ dramatically higher cost can be explained by the fact that they are usable as smart bulbs. These, currently, are not. :slightly_frowning_face:

Can anyone here reassure me that I haven’t made a strong error in judgement by purchasing these? Surely Wyze is working on bringing these basic features through a software update? I read the official response with a list of 5 features they may add in the future. This is a very limited list, and it was indicated that these features won’t even be coming simultaneously. There is also no timetable provided, so for all we know it could be next year before we’re finally able to use these smart bulbs as smart bulbs.

1 Like
2

you are using a V3 so you would need cam plus, but I use the exact same rule, but instead of motion, I have it turn on when PERSON is detected. no loop there.

as for a few of the other things. many of what you mentioned were brought up during testing and are things that are being looking into ( if not already being worked on) such as the ability to turn on for certain colors and such. I think most of this will be fixed through updates :slight_smile:

1 Like
3

I’ve got Cam Plus but was still getting false positives with the rule structured that way.

I really hope you’re right and they release a software update that enables these features. I’m willing to wait to see what they come up with, but I’d imagine lots of customers would be upset as I was when they realize how limited these bulbs currently are.

4

Also, I’m finding that the Bulb reacts to the AI “Person” trigger after a delay of around 18 seconds. This makes it extremely ineffective as a motion light.

5

yup. I get about 12-15 second reaction. this is because the clip is sent to the cloud where it’s run through the AI and then tagged and sent back to your app to carry out any rules. hopefully in the future this is sped up somehow, but the only way I could think of that happening is if smart detection was put back on the device on edge.

6

Can I assign ports in my router config to allow easier access?

7

I have never done that with these cameras. never felt the need to. I know there were some users that looked into doing static IP’S and i think port forwarding a while ago, so the best I can do is point you in that direction for now. I don’t think it gives any benefit for these unless you are using RTSP.

a few posts down on this they get into how they had to do it as I believe these cameras use DHCP. but this post is from a while ago. so i don’t know what may have changed between then and now. I haven’t looked into those intricacies in many moons.