Almost exactly a year ago, I reviewed Bifrost, which emulates a Philips Hue Bridge in software. I’ve recently replaced Bifrost with diyHue, which does the same thing, but with support for more devices.
Note: I was part-way through writing this when I had my fall, so consider it to be moderately cursed.
Comparing Bifrost with diyHue
There’s a useful comparison table between Bifrost and diyHue here, from Bifrost’s developer. Indeed, Bifrost was developed because of the developer’s shortcomings with diyHue, but the two work differently. Bifrost only works with Zigbee2MQTT, and so can only support Zigbee devices. By contrast, diyHue can work with a much wider range of devices, including any that connect via MQTT and Home Assistant. That opens up support for Govee, WLED and Matter/Thread based lights as well.
diyHue is also easier to set up – there’s no YAML file to configure. Instead, it can run as Home Assistant app, and offers its own web-based interface. This allows you to control which lights are exposed to the Hue app, should you not wish all of them to show up. This is especially useful if you have set up both its Home Assistant and MQTT links, as otherwise you’ll end up with duplicates.
You can also easily configure how each light appears to the Hue app, by selecting a model number to emulate. In my experience, diyHue gets this right most of the time, so that light controls in the Hue app match the features of the bulb, but you can tweak it if needed.
Benefits of using the Hue app
I touched on the main benefits of the Philips Hue app in my review of Bifrost, in that you can use its scene gallery to set multiple lights in the same room to complementary colours. At the moment, I only have one room with more than one colour changing light in it, so this isn’t so useful to me, but I’m planning to fit colour changing lightbulbs when we refurbish our bathroom later this year.
The other key benefit of having diyHue is that I can use the Hue app on my Fitbit Versa 3 smartwatch to control the lights. There are some situations where I want to turn lights on and off without using my voice, or having to reach for my phone in the dark. There isn’t really a good Home Assistant app for Fitbit devices (and Google is phasing out the Versa range anyway), so the Hue app is the next best thing.
I start this month still in my recovery period; today, I have an X-ray booked to see how my fractures are healing. My sick note for work has another week to run, and in some respects, me blogging again is part of me seeing if I’m able to start working from home again next week. I suspect it’ll be a few more weeks before I can go back into the office, not least because I’m not able to drive at the moment, or carry a backpack on the train.
International visitor
Christine has extended family in the USA, and we’re expecting to host one of her relatives later this month. The plan is for them to stay in our spare room, and, up until I injured myself, we had been making good progress at turning our spare room from a dumping ground for our junk, into a usable bedroom. To the extent that we’d taken two car loads of stuff to the local recycling centre, and another two car loads were donated to a local charity. I’m hoping we’ve done enough to make it usable, but it’s not quite where we had hoped it would be.
Their visit is mostly to sort out some family property and inheritance issues, so nothing too exciting.
Considering that previous two mice that I had (both Tecknet mice from Amazon) each lasted about a year, I’m somewhat pleased that this has managed almost four years, although I’m sure I’ve had Logitech mice that have lasted far longer in the past. So, I’ll be spending this week looking for a suitable replacement – ideally, it’ll be another multi-device mouse.
A quick glance at one price comparison site is showing prices around £100 more expensive than last year’s premium, but I’ll see if those prices come down nearer the time.
Just a short one this month – as mentioned yesterday, I’m still in my recovery, and my typing is slow and not particularly accurate.
What we didn’t do in May
I did my usual look ahead to the start of the month on the 1st, listing the things we expected to do. Alas, my injuries meant that I never made it to the Everything Electric show in Harrogate, or the gig that I mentioned. That was a Professor Elemental gig in Leeds, being supported by fellow ‘chap hop’ artists Mr B the Gentleman Rhymer and Thomas Benjamin Wild Esq. Ironically, this is the second Professor Elemental gig we’ve missed this year, as we were supposed to see him at Sci-Fi Weekender in March before that got cancelled.
Christine also never made it to London, as she stayed back to help me, and we’re not at UKGE this weekend. Oh well.
Does bad luck come in threes?
There’s a saying that bad luck comes in threes. If we take my injuries as one, then number two would be that we had a gas leak at home last week, and number three would be that we got a flat tyre on our car on Friday.
The gas leak was easily solved – we rang the National Gas Leak Emergency Number, and an engineer from our local gas distribution network was over within the hour. It was a minor leak – the pipe connecting our meter to the inlet pipe had come very slightly loose. Once tightened, it was fine. And as the leak was on the network side of the meter, we would not have been charged for the excess gas. It’s probably a good thing we no longer have a gas cooker, as that would have ignited the leaking gas and could have caused a major explosion. As it is, we only need gas for our central heating and hot water, and in the long term, we’ll replace our boiler with an electric heat pump so that we can come off the gas grid all together.
As for the flat tyre, we used our breakdown cover to get a recovery truck to bring the car home (seeing as it was after 7pm on a Friday and we weren’t too far from home), and we have a technician coming to us to replace it today. Like the gas leak, easily fixed, but a bit annoying. Let’s hope that I don’t have any more bad luck, eh?
The Wolverhampton Taxi Problem
Back in 2015, I wrote a (comparatively) lengthy blog post about taxis registered in the borough of Rossendale in Lancashire, but operating elsewhere, and the issues this causes. A decade on, and it seems like the issue has shifted to Wolverhampton: there’s a lengthy piece on Mobility Matters about it. Almost 30,000 private hire vehicles are registered in Wolverhampton, which would mean one taxi for every ten residents, against a national average of 3 to every 1000. Of course, they’re not all operating there, and it’s reckoned that around a third of those operate in Greater Manchester. A hat tip to London Reconnections for the link.
I’m still in my recovery period – I’m not allowed to lift anything for another three weeks – but I am going to post a few, short blog posts again to get myself used to typing again. So, here’s this month’s playlist, which should give you an idea about how my recovery is going. Here’s the link to Spotify.
“Everybody Hurts” by R.E.M.
“Broken Bones” by Love Inc
“The Drugs Don’t Work” by The Verve
“Give Me Novacaine” by Green Day
“I Need A Painkiller” by Armand van Helden
“Wonderful Life” by Hurts
“Insomnia” by Faithless
“Can’t Sleep” by Above and Beyond
No extra analysis this month, I’m afraid. I can’t type at my normal speed, and my accuracy is lower than usual. Hopefully, normal service will be resumed next month.
It’s my birthday today. I’m still recovering, and not yet able to spend a long time typing, so this is coming from my phone again. However, I have re-gained some movement in my arms compared to a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been out of hospital for almost two weeks now.
The 25th May is also Towel Day, marking the life of Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Those of you familiar with the book, radio series, TV series or film will know the significance of the number 42. Well, today is my 42nd birthday.
As I’m still recovering, today will be a quiet day with possibly a nice meal out somewhere at lunchtime. Once I’m fit enough to start using a proper keyboard again, I’ll be able to resume blogging more regularly.
This is a short blog post that I am tapping out on my phone. Since Thursday last week, I have been in hospital, having had a fall at home which resulted in me fracturing bones in both my shoulders (specifically necks of humerus).
I’ve now exhausted the scheduled posts that I’d written before the fall, and both arms need to be non-load baring for another five weeks or so to allow them to heal, so I’m going to have to take a blogging hiatus for now. Which is a shame; I was working on my views of this year’s Eurovision entries when the fall happened.
See you all soon, hopefully when I no longer have T-rex arms.
WLED is custom firmware for controlling multi-colour LED lights. It’s designed for string lights, with lots of individual LEDs that can be controlled independently. I’ve recently given it a try for the first time.
ESP devices
WLED runs on Espressif’s ESP32 and ESP8266 chips (although the latter isn’t recommended for new installs). That means it’s like ESPHome, Tasmota and ESPurna, in that it is also open source and customisable. However, whereas these alternatives can be used on a wide variety of devices, WLED is designed just for controlling LED lights. Sure, you can probably configure ESPHome to do the same, but you would end up with a huge and unwieldy YAML file to be able to recreate WLED’s functionality.
You can build your own controllers with an ESP chip like those from Seeed Studio and m5stack, and there are wiring diagrams to help you. It’s recommended that you include some capacitors, fuses and level shifters, along with the MCU chip, and you’ll need to be good at soldering.
Or, you could do what I did, and buy a pre-built controller box with the WLED firmware pre-installed. Amazon will sell you one from Gledopto for £25 (sponsored link), however, I purchased mine from AliExpress for £10.79, which is less than half price. Whilst buying the individual components may be cheaper, a pre-built box doesn’t require any soldering. Gledopto offer a range of different units, and some more expensive models include a built-in microphone to allow the lights to synchronise with music.
Replacing Tuya with WLED
The lights that I wanted to use originally came with a Tuya Wi-Fi controller. I try to avoid Tuya Wi-Fi devices, as they require access to Tuya’s servers to work. WLED can work entirely locally, with no need to connect to cloud servers (apart from for firmware updates). I also found that, whilst the Tuya app offered lots of effects, these weren’t available on other smart home platforms.
The MCU in the Tuya controller looks like a Beken BK7231 chip, and so I may have been able to install OpenBeken or ESPHome on it, but not WLED as WLED is ESP-only. As mentioned above, WLED is designed to control LED lights, whereas OpenBeken and ESPHome would have needed a lot of configuration. Besides, I couldn’t seem to use the Tuya-Cloudcutter exploit, and couldn’t find the pins I would have needed to upload new firmware via UART.
So instead, I bought a replacement WLED controller, and then cut the wires from the old circuit board. Thankfully, the terminals where the wires connected were labelled, and so I could easily match these with the new WLED controller. Like I said, there was no soldering required – on the new controller, I just lifted the plastic pins to open the ports, fed the wires in, and then locked the pins. The controller needs a minimum of 5 volts, which is what you get from USB and so I just wired in the existing USB cable from the Tuya controller. It can accept higher, going up to 24 volts DC.
Once power was provided, the LEDs all light up with a bright orange glow. I then used my phone to connect to the WLED-AP hotspot that appeared, and used the hotspot login screen to give WLED my Wi-Fi network details. And that was it – after that, I could use the controller’s IP address to open a web page to control the lights.
Using WLED to control lights
WLED is very powerful. With LED lights like the ones I used, it can control the colour and brightness of each individual LED. That means each one can be a different colour, and you can have patterns as each one fades on and off and to different colours. It comes with lots of built-in effects, and you can save these as presets that come on as soon as the lights are turned on. Multiple presets can be combined into a playlist.
Whilst the main way to use WLED is using the web interface, there are official apps for iPhone and Android, that will detect your lights using mDNS. That being said, the iPhone app is mostly just a wrapper around the web interface. Third-party apps seem to exist which offer a more native interface, but I haven’t tried these myself yet.
Smart home integration
If you’re a Home Assistant user, then WLED has a built-in integration. New WLED devices should be detected automatically by Home Assistant, and you can control almost all of the features within Home Assistant. This includes setting presets and playlists, amending the speed of effects and the intensity.
Getting your WLED devices into other smart home ecosystems is a little more difficult. There is a Matter bridge, which needs to run on another device that has Docker installed. I tried this, but couldn’t get it to work; I gather from one of the bug reports on Github that it’s not compatible with newer versions of WLED.
With a bit of trial and error, I managed to get it working with Matterbridge. I had to hide some of the sub-entities as otherwise it wouldn’t show and caused errors in the logs. This allowed me to control it with Google Home and Apple Home. However, this control was limited to selecting a single colour and brightness for all LEDs, or switching on and off. Better than nothing, but not as granular as Home Assistant.
WLED isn’t for everyone – I found it easy enough to set up, and I like the high level of control it offers. But it is very much a DIY solution, that requires you to buy (or build) the controller and lights separately, so it’s not for everyone.
I’m planning another WLED project; this time to replace the non-smart controller for my ring light. I’ve seen a guide for replacing the controller; that guide involves building your own controller and 3D-printing a box for it. I think I’ll just buy another Gledopto box.
Last month marked three years since I bought my iPhone 13 Mini. Unfortunately, it was starting to show its age a little – the battery was not holding charge very well, and the charger port was being awkward, which exacerbated the charging issue.
I quite like the size of the iPhone 13 Mini, and I’m disappointed that Apple has stopped making iPhones this small. As I write this, the smallest iPhone is the iPhone 17E, which is 15mm taller and 7mm wider, as well as weighing 30 grams more. And compared to the iPhone 17 Pro Max, my phone is 2/3rds of the weight, 30mm shorter and 12mm narrower. I resisted moving from the iPhone 5/5S form factor to the iPhone 6/7/8 partly because I felt that was too big – the iPhone 13 Mini has turned out to be an almost perfect size.
So, I have a good reason for sticking with my current iPhone. Plus, sorting out the issues with my phone would prove to be much cheaper than buying a new one.
New iPhone battery
I had previously had the battery on my iPhone 8 replaced, which helped it last for five years. So, doing the same with my current phone made sense. I was able to get a local phone repair shop to do the job in about half an hour, so that I didn’t have to be without my phone for too long. The ‘new’ battery isn’t actually brand new; it’s been recovered from another iPhone 13 Mini that had been disassembled. As such, it didn’t have its full 100% battery capacity as new from the factory. Instead, it offered 94%, which is better than the 80% that my current battery offered. 80% doesn’t sound too bad, but I was having to charge it multiple times per day – especially when we were in London. At 94%, it can do some whole days without needing a top-up charge.
As the new battery is a genuine Apple battery, the phone doesn’t complain about it. Indeed, the engineer who fitted the new battery walked me through how newer iPhones are able to authenticate genuine Apple batteries fitted outside of the factory. Once the new battery is fitted, it reboots into a cut-down version of iOS where it authenticates over Wi-Fi, and then reboots again when done.
Cleaning the charger port
The phone repair shop also cleaned out the charger port for me. I’ve tried blasting it with a can of compressed air, which helped, but it could still be awkward with some cables. Instead, the shop used tweezers to pull out stray dust that was insulating the contacts in the charger port. It now charges much better.
I wouldn’t go far as to say that my iPhone is like new again. Arguably it now acts like a one year old phone, rather than a three year old phone, but that’s a big improvement. It would be great to get this one to five years old, like its predecessor, before needing replacement. By then, maybe Apple will have started offering a smaller form factor iPhone again?
As for the cost? For the new battery, installation and charger port cleaning, I paid £60 at the local repair shop. Had I opted for a third-party, non-genuine battery, it would have been cheaper. By contrast, Apple charges £85, and I would have also had to factor in getting to the nearest Apple Store in Leeds. £60 for what I hope will be another two years of use isn’t bad.
Last month, we had a nice, quiet Sunday afternoon strolling around Cromwell Bottom nature reserve. We’ve been a few times as it’s not far from us, and indeed it was one of the few places we could get out to during lockdown. However, it appears that this is the first time I have blogged about it.
History of Cromwell Bottom
There’s not much history online, but what is now the nature reserve was originally a quarry. Later, fly ash from Elland power station was dumped here, and then more recently it was used as a landfill site. In 2000, it was allowed to return to nature.
It’s a comparatively isolated site, being as it is squeezed in between the River Calder, the Calder and Hebble Navigation, and the lower section of the Calder Valley railway. As such, it has lent itself well to becoming a nature reserve, and is easily accessed from the canal towpath.
Different habitats
Different parts of Cromwell Bottom offer different habitats. There’s a large wooded area, mostly full of silver birch trees, but there’s also a meadow and some marshy wetland areas. As such, it’s possible to see quite a wide variety of wildlife.
Whilst Calderdale Council, the local authority, own and manage the nature reserve, there is an active volunteer organisation called Cromwell Bottom Wildlife Group. In particular, they look after an area of bird feeders, with a bird hide. We stopped there for around 20 minutes, and saw a number of different bird species. The largest was a hen pheasant, but we also saw chaffinches, robins, blue tits, coal tits, great tits and pigeons. On a previous visit, I also saw a nuthatch, and we heard a buzzard, confirmed by Merlin Bird ID.
Out on the river, I saw a heron and a goosander, the latter of which I don’t think I’ve previously seen before.
The Wildlife Group also publish several leaflets, with suggested walking routes around the site. You can download these as PDFs.
Accessibility
Most of the paths around the site are step-free, but there are some steep slopes. They are not paved and the ground can be uneven in places. There are gates on some of the paths which require a radar key to open for wheelchair access.
The Cromwell Bottom Wildlife Group runs a visitor centre, at the western end of the site just off the canal, and this includes disabled toilets. However, it’s operated by volunteers, and is only open on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays between 10am and 4pm. The nearest Changing Places toilet is in Tesco in Brighouse.
Limited parking is available near the visitor centre. It’s on rough ground and often fills up. Buses stop on the main road – the E4 bus runs hourly between Elland and Brighouse on weekdays and every two hours on Saturdays. There’s no Sunday service, so if you need to get there by bus and may need the toilet, visit on a Tuesday or a Thursday.
If you’re reading this in 2029, then Elland railway station may be the closest, but as construction hasn’t started yet, Brighouse railway station is the closest. It’s then a sedate 45 minute walk along the canal towpath.
If you’re out and about in nature a lot, then I can recommend the Merlin Bird ID app. It’s a project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, part of Cornell University in New York State in the US. Its aim is to help you identify birds.
What sets Merlin Bird ID apart from other bird-identifying sites and books is that it can use audio. Turn your phone’s microphone on with the app open, and it’ll listen for bird calls. You’ll then get a list of the birds it can identify as it analyses the sound it records. You can even download a data pack for your part of the world, so that it can analyse the sound data offline. Whilst it makes for a big download, it’s helpful for when you’re somewhere remote, and don’t have a phone signal.
I’ve used it a few times. Most notably, we went to Quarry Bank Mill just before Christmas, and I used Merlin Bird ID to identify some parakeets in the trees. Parakeets are, of course, not native to the countryside south of Manchester, but as they were a little distance away, it was good to have them confirmed.
I’ve included a screenshot of a recent day out where it identified:
Eurasian Treecreeper
Eurasian Blackbird
Eurasian Blue Tit
Great Tit
Eurasian Wren
Indeed, we then saw most of these birds as we walked around. There is also a visual guide for identifying the birds, but it isn’t (yet) able to analyse photos. However, I find that Apple Photos does a reasonably good job of automatically identifying birds from photos. It’s the audio feature that I appreciate most in Merlin Bird ID.
