As an alternative, we have found bulbs that can run tasmota with the MQTT integration to be perhaps the most reliable part of our smart home (as long as the hardware already had a descent CRI). I've heard good things about ESP home too, but we have not tried it.

If someone has some light bulbs that are laggy (due to cloud integrations) or a pain to use due to software, its worth checking out of tasmota or esp home can be installed on them to locally pair with something like home assistant. It turned a regretful purchase into a nice addition.

With that said, we don't buy connected devices any longer without checking internet and cloud requirements first.

[–] Lemmee@sh.itjust.works 1 points 57 minutes ago

Tasmota is awesome. I flashed all my early Shelly devices with it. But now the native Shelly firmware is amazing, and it allows you to turn on local mqtt only. So I’ve stopped using Tasmota for everything besides the few devices flashed early and behind my wall switches. (I’m too lazy to pull them out)

Is it hard to flash bulbs with Tasmota? Don’t you usually need access to the pins? Or have an OTA option for updating the firmware?

[–] LowlandSavage@lemmy.ca 1 points 10 hours ago

I love my lutron Caseta gear. Integrates with home assistant and reverts to dumb. Expensive ass dimmer though, and they run on a proprietary hub.