MagicHome v1.1.3

A diagnostics release. No behaviour changes to the lights.

• Any device action the plugin does not handle now logs a warning naming it, instead of being ignored in silence. Being asked to do something and quietly not doing it is the worst available outcome — no effect and no explanation.
• Every action dispatch is logged at debug level.
• The device's capability properties are now set from the model the controller reports, rather than from whatever the device was created with. An RGBWW controller no longer ends up declared as RGBW with a white channel it cannot reach.

Worth knowing

If changing the colour does nothing while on and off still work, close the colour picker and open it again. A picker that was open before the plugin restarted is left pointing at an instance that no longer exists, and using it does nothing at all — including logging nothing. On and off keep working because those come from the device list, which stays live.

That is not specific to this plugin, and it bites hardest while you are setting one up, since that is when it gets restarted with dialogs open. It is now in the troubleshooting guide.

MagicHome v1.1.2

Fixes the colour picker opening on a black wheel after the light had been showing white.

These controllers report their colour channels as zero while showing white, because the colour emitters really are off — and the plugin was passing that straight through, wiping the light's colour out of Indigo. The picker then had nothing to go back to.

The last colour is now kept while the light is in white mode. The mode state still says White, so nothing pretends the colour channels are lit; it just remembers what you had, the same way a Zigbee bulb in colour-temp mode does.

Installing

1. Download MagicHome.indigoPlugin.zip below
2. Unzip it — you will get MagicHome.indigoPlugin
3. Double-click it, and Indigo will install it

MagicHome v1.1.1

Fixes Test Connection and Show Plugin Info, both of which failed on the first click in v1.1.0.

The diagnostic banner printed its standard fields and then threw part way through, so the two menu items most likely to be reached for when something else has gone wrong were themselves broken. Worth updating for.

Nothing else has changed — if you are not using those menu items, v1.1.0 works fine.

Installing

1. Download MagicHome.indigoPlugin.zip below
2. Unzip it — you will get MagicHome.indigoPlugin
3. Double-click it, and Indigo will install it

MagicHome v1.1.0

Adds a short demo mode.

Run Demo

A Run Demo button in the Configure dialog with a light picker, and a Run Demo item in the plugin's menu that does every light you have.

It runs red, green and blue one at a time, then warm white, then cool white, then a five second fade — and puts the light back exactly as it was. About fifteen seconds.

The order is chosen for what is actually worth seeing:

• The colour channels one at a time is how a strip wired in a different channel order gives itself away. If red comes up green, that is the wiring, and you know inside five seconds.
• Both whites, one after the other, is how the warm-versus-cool business stops being a surprise. An RGBW controller has one white channel and it is the warm one; "cool white" is red, green and blue together. Seeing them back to back explains it better than any amount of documentation.

It stops the moment any command arrives for that light, so you can cut it short by touching the brightness slider. A light that was off is only put back off if the demo reached the end — one stopped half way was stopped by somebody who wanted the light on.

Installing

1. Download MagicHome.indigoPlugin.zip below
2. Unzip it — you will get MagicHome.indigoPlugin
3. Double-click it, and Indigo will install it

If the Run Demo button does not appear, restart the Indigo client. It caches plugin dialog definitions, so a new field in a Configure dialog is not always picked up until it does.

Everything else is unchanged. See the README and the documentation.

MagicHome v1.0.1

Adds the Plugin Store icon. No functional change — if v1.0.0 is working for you, there is nothing here you need.

The icon is generated by tools/make_icon.py rather than drawn by hand, so it can be regenerated or adjusted without a design tool. The motif is an RGBW strip with red, green, blue and a warm white emitter — the actual channel layout of the hardware rather than a generic light bulb, and the warm fourth emitter is the whole quirk of these controllers.

Installing

1. Download MagicHome.indigoPlugin.zip below
2. Unzip it — you will get MagicHome.indigoPlugin
3. Double-click it, and Indigo will install it

Then Plugins → MagicHome → Discover Controllers, and add a device.

Everything else is as it was in v1.0.0: a native Indigo dimmer, discovery by MAC, the controller's own built-in patterns, and plugin-driven fades, colour drift, sunrise and flash. See the README and the documentation.

MagicHome v1.0.0

First release.

Direct local control of Zengge / Magic Home WiFi LED controllers from Indigo — the ones sold as Magic Home, Magic Hue, FVTLED, LEDENET and various other names. No cloud account, no app running in the background, nothing to store.

What you get

• A native Indigo dimmer, so the standard brightness slider and colour picker work, along with everything that already understands a dimmer — control pages, triggers, schedules, HomeKit bridges.
• Discovery by MAC address, so a controller keeps working when your router hands it a different IP.
• The controller's own 20 built-in patterns, and custom patterns of up to 16 colours that it stores and cycles itself.
• Plugin-driven effects the controller cannot do alone: smooth fades, slow colour drift around a palette, a sunrise on a perceptual ramp, and a flash that puts the previous colour back.

Installing

1. Download MagicHome.indigoPlugin.zip below
2. Unzip it — you will get MagicHome.indigoPlugin
3. Double-click it, and Indigo will install it

Then Plugins → MagicHome → Discover Controllers, and add a device.

Worth knowing before you start

An RGBW controller has one white channel and it is the warm one. What the app offers as "cool white" is red, green and blue driven together — there is no second white channel to address, and the two are mutually exclusive. Both are available as separate actions.

Bluetooth-only controllers are not supported. Some recent Zengge hardware has dropped the network protocol entirely.

Documentation

The protocol reference records what these controllers actually do, measured and read back rather than taken on trust — including several places where the widely published account and the hardware disagree. There is also an architecture note, a scripting guide and troubleshooting.

Developed against an FVTLED / Zengge RGBW controller and verified end to end on real hardware. 187 tests.