Last week, Home Assistant notified me that there was a firmware update for the Nanoleaf Essentials smart bulb that I bought last year. Installing it turned out to be a bit of a palaver, hence me writing a blog post about it.
If you want the short version:
- Set aside about half an hour.
- Update the firmware over Bluetooth, not via Thread.
- Remove the bulb from all your smart home platforms (Home Assistant, Google Home, Apple Home etc)
- Re-add the bulb as a new device
- Reconfigure all your automations and dashboards to point to the new device entry
Trying to install the firmware over Thread
When I saw that Home Assistant was offering the firmware update (version 5.1.45), I clicked install, and then let it do its thing. I was then a little surprised to find that, several hours later, the install was apparently still going.
The firmware isn’t big – smart home devices with small MCUs only have a few megabytes of storage at best, so it shouldn’t have taken hours to download. Indeed, it didn’t – the download took just a few minutes. Installing software via Bluetooth or Thread is slower than Wi-Fi as these protocols are not designed for high bandwidth data transfer; if this was a Wi-Fi device, the download would have likely taken seconds, rather than minutes.
It seemed like the bulb was downloading the firmware update successfully, but then failing to install the firmware. Indeed, I left it several days to work, and tried the download again a couple of times, but no luck.
Installing the firmware via Bluetooth
In the end, I turned to Google and found this Reddit thread where people were having the same problem. The solution was to use the Nanoleaf app, and update the bulb via Bluetooth. This meant having my phone close to the bulb, but it took a few minutes and installed successfully. That was the good news.
The bad news is that, once the bulb came back online, it decided it was a new device. This meant that it needed re-adding to each smart home ecosystem that I use at home – Home Assistant, Google Home and Apple Home. I also had to fix its dashboard entries in Home Assistant, and fix the automations that subsequently broke.
With Home Assistant in particular, I had to make sure that the old device entry was fully removed from both Home Assistant itself, and from the Matter Server addon, before re-adding. Otherwise, it would not re-add properly – the Matter commissioning process would fail.
Benefits of the new Nanoleaf firmware
So, with all of this rigmarole, is it actually worth installing the new firmware? The biggest benefit is that this new firmware supports a newer version of Matter – version 1.4.2, instead of 1.2. On the same Reddit thread, people have reported the bulb being more reliable and responsive with the new firmware. I haven’t noticed much difference myself, but it is working at least as well as before.
Unfortunately I’ve misplaced the manual that came with the bulb, which has the QR code for Matter commissioning on it. That meant that I had to take the bulb out of the socket, scan the code, and then refit it to commission it over Matter. Bearing in mind that this bulb is in a ceiling light, so all of this was done atop a stepladder.
I’m hoping that future firmware updates will work better over Thread, and I won’t have to go through this again.
