Oddbean

@7d199f28 A friend of mine suggested different lights simply due to price alone; never mind the inshitification factor...are you now recommending the same thing? Singeld, I think is the brand that my friend mentioned?

@5ca95688 right now you can just pick any lightbulb that comes with a Zigbee compatibility logo - which is probably the case for most of the bulbs that advertise smart features. There's hundreds of brands and models on the market, and the Zigbee specification for lightbulbs is (kind of) standardized around the Hue model. zigbee2mqtt (and therefore Platypush) currently supports thousands of devices (https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/), so you just plug in the bulb, put the dongle in pairing mode from Platypush, and everything should connect automatically. It's almost easier than the pairing process through the Hue app. I have recently purchased a couple more Zigbee spare bulbs from a random Chinese store - around $10 for white and $20 for color. That's literally 70% cheaper than the equivalent Hue bulbs, they provide the same exact features and look exactly the same way from a software perspective. A hypothesis is that everyone is now going for these cheap models, as they also come with out-of-the-box compatibility with the Hue bridge and official app, and nobody is spending $50 per bulb - and that's why Hue is trying to make up for their lost revenue with more aggressive data harvesting strategies...

@7d199f28 A guy from work likes the GE ones...I'll see if they work with that, as well. they work with HomeAssistant, I know that for sure. Not sure about Platypush by default, but they might. I think my network is going to (for now) be a combination of both Platypush and HA due to different things that each supports.

@5ca95688 the zigbee2mqtt devices compatibility page is a good bookmark https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/ If a device is there, it's basically guaranteed to work with both Platypush and HASS, since both the platforms use zigbee2mqtt as a backend.

@7d199f28 Isn't that interesting. I never knew that most of these things were so similar. I need to find this guy's blog again,but there's a guy somewhere in the US, and his home automation system is quite impressive.