Home Assistant custom component for Yeelight Bedside lamp

This is a custom component for Home Assistant that allows the control of the Yeelight bedside Lamp via bluetooth. (Contrary to the wifi version, those lamps only have bluetooth control).

Originally based on the work by Teemu Rytilahti python-yeelightbt, it has been completely re-written to improve stability and only focuses on the integration with HA.

Installation

This custom component can be installed in two different ways: manually or using HACS

1. Installation using HACS (recommended)

This repo is now in hacs, so just search for it, install and enjoy automatic updates.

2. Manual Installation

1. Download the hass-yeelight_bt.zip file from the latest release.
2. Unpack the release and copy the custom_components/yeelight_bt directory into the custom_components directory of your Home Assistant installation.
3. Ensure bluez is installed and accessible from HA (refer to next section)
4. Add the yeelight_bt lights as described in next section.

Ensure Host bluetooth is accessible from Home-Assistant

Since version 1.0.0, this component uses the bleak python library to access bluetooth (as bluepy is not supported from HA 2022.07+). In order to scan and interact with bluetooth devices, bluez utility needs to be installed and the correct permissions must be given to HA:

• for Home Assistant Operating System: It should be all setup, at least for HA 2022.7+

• For Home Assistant Container in docker:

  Ensure your host has the bluetoothctl binary on the system (coming from bluez or bluez-util package, depending on the distro).
  The docker-compose container (or equivalent docker command) should link /var/run/dbus with host folder through a volume and NET_ADMIN permission is needed. docker compose extract:

  volumes:
    - /var/run/dbus:/var/run/dbus
  cap_add:
   - NET_ADMIN
   - NET_RAW
  network_mode: host

• For Home Assistant Core installed in a Virtualenv:

  Ensure your host has the bluetoothctl binary on the system (coming from bluez or bluez-util package, depending on the distro).
  Make sure the user running HA belongs to the bluetooth group.

Homeassistant component configuration

The devices can be configured either through the integration menu or the configuration.yaml file. Please ensure the following steps prior to adding a new light:

• The light must NOT be connected with the official app (or any other device), else HA will not be able to discover it, nor connect to it.
• Once the light has been paired with this component, you should not try to connect it with the app, or the two will constantly fight for the connection.
• Some HA integrations still use some bluetooth libraries that take full control of the physical bluetooth adapter, in that case, other ble integration will not have access to it. So to test this component, best to disable all other ble integrations if you are unsure what ble lib they are using.

1. Using the integrations menu

In Configuration/Integrations click on the + button, select Yeelight bluetooth and configure the name and mac address on the form. The light is automatically added and a device is created.

2. Using configuration.yaml

1. For each lamp, create a light with the yeelight_bt platform and configure the name and mac address.

   Example:

   light:
     - platform: yeelight_bt
       name: Bedside lamp
       mac: 'f8:24:41:xx:xx:xx'
     - platform: yeelight_bt
       name: Other lamp
       mac: 'f8:24:41:xx:xx:xx'

2. Restart Home Assistant.

   Please note that in an effort to streamline the maintenance of this component, I will very soon remove the option to configure via yaml.

Light pairing

1. If the light has been paired with a previous device prior, best to reset it following this youtube video
2. The custom component will automatically request a pairing with the lamp if it needs to. When the pairing request is sent, the light will pulse. You then need to push the little button at the top of the lamp.
   Once paired you can control the lamp through HA

A note on bleak and bluetooth in HA

Starting with 2022.08, HA is trying to provide a framework centered around bleak so that all components can use the same interface and avoid conflicts between the different ble libraries used by the different components. This is early days and a bit of work in progress. Once stabilised, I will see if I can use that framework for this component too.

While bluepy had a few issues, it seems that my limited experience with bleak and the underlying ble lib bluez is not that much better and can be quite unstable. I only have one yeelight bedside, so if you have issues with candella or multiple lights, please report an issue (with debugging logs) so we can try to sort it out.

Debugging

Please ensure the following:

1. The xiaomi yeelight app is not being used and force shut (or even better to turn bt off if unsure).

2. the Yeelight_bt integration has been removed from HA.

3. HA has access to the bluetooth adapter (follow the section above in not on HAOS).

4. No other bluetooth integration are using something else than bleak library for bluetooth. If unsure, disable them.

5. The logging has been changed in HA to allow debugging of this component and bleak:
   In order to get more information on what is going on, the debugging flag can be enabled by placing in the configuration.yaml of Home assistant:

   logger:
     default: error
     logs:
       custom_components.yeelight_bt: debug
       bleak: debug

   NOTE: this will generate A LOT of debugging messages in the logs, so it is not recommended to use for a long time

6. The light has been fully reset so that it is not paired with any device.

7. Restart HA

8. Reinstall the yeelight_bt integration and find the light through a scan.

9. check the logs and report. Thanks