I've had the timeout happen to me. The bulb does connect to your wifi, just connect your phone to your wifi manually near the end of the pairing and it will continue where it left off. Afterwards, enable LAN mode control and uninstall the app, you never need to use it again. You can use the YeeLight Python library (which I wrote!) and yee (or HA) to do anything you want.
I wish there was a way to completely avoid the app. I have a bunch of Aqara devices that are Zigbee and they never even talked to Xiaomi because I only connected them to my Conbee without ever installing any Xiaomi App or whatever.
I wonder how hard it is to add an ESP8266 to the lamps and just control via the ESP.
Yeah you can. You can get something like a CC2531 which works great aswell. Not sure If it's supported by ZHA yet but https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/ worked very good with my CC2531. I just switched to the Conbee because it was supported by ZHA and I wanted my lights etc to directly connect to Home Assistant with ZHA.
The CC2531 looks dirt-cheap, Ali stocks it for $2. What's ZHA? I saw it mentioned in the article but don't understand why the CC2531 doesn't work with it. I was thinking of buying an ITEAD Zigbee bridge, but I don't know whether that will work with ZHA or why I'd want it to...
ZHA is Zigbee Home Automation. It's basically the part of Home Assitant that deals with zigbee devices. So it's like first party vs something like zigbee2mqtt which then hooks into Home Assitant.
Makes a little less work configuring etc, but not all Zigbee sticks are supported. Check support here
Ahh, so it's a HA thing. The ITEAD gateway is explicitly listed as supported, so that seals it. Their stuff has always been stellar, thank you for the info.
