Playing Yeelight with Python

Recently I've been playing a Yeelight Smart LED Bulb. It'd be a good starting of learning home automation, as such smart LED Bulbs do not depend on any modification of your home electricity system. This yeelight bulb is already bundled with the WIFI chip so that you can configure it using its official app (both Android and iOS are available)

Using the official app is straight forward, then I wondered can I play it 'harder'. Then I searched and found some interest use cases:

1. Controlling yeelight by Python
2. Controlling yeelight by Siri (wow!)
3. Controlling yeelight by Home-Assistant

In fact there should be more cases, including Amazon Alexa or Google Home, but I do have these products and the setup will be very similar to 2. and 3, that I will explain it in another post later. Right now I am going to share how to play the yeelight with python.

First, you need the official app to enable developer mode. Then just use python yeelight package https://yeelight.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ and you are good to go!

import yeelight

yeelight_ip='xxx.xxx.xx.xxx' # your yeelight bulb IP
light = yeelight.Bulb(yeelight_ip, effect='smooth')
light.turn_off()
light.turn_on()

# Set it to white
light.set_rgb(255,255,255)

# Set the brightness
light.set_brightness(100)

Not very difficult right? If you have a raspberry Pi you can set some cronjobs in order to turn the light on in the morning as a silent  alarm clock, or place the bulb in your kid's bedroom, then change the brightness from 100% to 1% (then off, of course) in one hour.

If you think it's too dummy to control such a bulb, I agree. That's why there will be some more elegant solutions. Next time I'll show how I setup a virtual HomeKit and ask Siri to control the bulb.

Ref:

• setup yeelight using official apps video
• Enable developer mode: http://www.yeelight.com/en_US/developer
• Python Yeelight Library: https://yeelight.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Nextcloud on Archlinux

Recently I'm trying Nextcloud, which is a fork of Owncloud.

I have to admit that I am not a big fan of PHP apps. When I tested Owncloud several years ago I only felt it's very slow.....As someone recommended Nextcloud a few weeks ago I'd like to give it a try.

The installation doc was well but since it is only for Redhat and Ubuntu. I'd like to add some notes when using Archlinux (with Nginx, PHP-FPM, Mariadb, Redis Server):

1. The official packages are needed ("pacman -Sy nginx, php-fpm, mariadb, redis")
2. The AUR package php-smbclient is needed if you want to use the external storage feature with SMB/CIFS
3. Using memory caching can improve the performance. From the doc you can choose APCu, Memcached and Redis. I am using Redis server since it should be most flexible approach. AUR package php-redis, again, is needed.
4. Download the latest Nextcloud package. Extract and put it under /var/www
5. under /etc/php/php.ini, make sure these lines are uncommented:
   zend_extension=opcache.so
   extension=pdo_mysql.so
   extension="smbclient.so"
   extension="redis.so"
6. Following the official method to setup Nginx 
7. Enable the services so that they will bring up after a reboot. (systemctl enable xxx)
8. Using SSL is highly recommended. It's very easy to get one from Let's Encrypt with zero cost.

I will setup a container on my proxmox and evaluate for a while and give a brief review about it  later.