Home Assistant

The box is a standard ESPHome device. Home Assistant finds it, you press Configure, and your lights are there. Nothing to install, no custom integration, no YAML.

Adding the box

Under Settings → Devices & services a discovered ESPHome device named amble-home-xxxxxx appears with a Configure button. If it is not offered, press Add integration, choose ESPHome and give the box's address (amble-home-xxxxxx.local). The box's Home page has a link that opens that screen.

The box is one device. Its page in Home Assistant lists everything below.

What each fixture gives you

For every fixture you checked on the Edit page:

• A light, named as in the amaran app. On/off, brightness, color temperature within the fixture's range, and color (hue and saturation) on fixtures that have it. Turning a light on brings it back exactly as it was when it went off, because the fixture itself remembers its look.
• A green/magenta number, from −10 to +10, on fixtures that have the adjustment. On fixtures that do not, the control is present but hidden by default.
• An identify button, which flashes that light so you can tell which is which.

Color temperature and color are exclusive modes on the fixture, as in the app: whichever you set last wins.

What the box reports

Under the device's diagnostics:

• Mesh up: whether the box is on the mesh.
• Mesh commands sent, Mesh status replies, Mesh status timeouts, Mesh commands refused, Mesh send failures, Mesh unknown sources, Mesh sequence number, Mesh IV index: counters that explain what the box is doing. Send failures must stay at zero; it is the one that means the radio stack is unwell. Unknown sources counts replies from lights you did not import, which is normal on a shared mesh.
• Wi-Fi signal and Uptime.
• Restart reboots the box. Re-sync fixtures asks every light for its state now.

The diagnostics are quiet: they do not fill the logbook.

How the box follows the amaran app

The box asks each fixture for its state about every 15 seconds, so a change you make in the app, or at the light's own buttons, shows in Home Assistant within that time. A light that stops answering becomes unavailable in Home Assistant; it comes back as soon as it answers again.

Names and renames

Each light's Home Assistant entity is anchored to the fixture's hardware address, not its name. Rename a light in the amaran app, re-import, and the entity keeps its id, its history and its place in your automations; only the display name follows. Rename it in Home Assistant instead and Home Assistant's name wins from then on, as with any device.

A new box is a new device with a new name and new entity ids. If you replace a box, re-point your scenes and dashboards, or rename the new entities to the old ids.

Scenes, groups, dashboards

Everything is an ordinary Home Assistant light. Light groups, scenes, scripts and dashboards all work as they do for any other light. Scenes are the right home for looks the amaran app calls effects or presets; the box does not map those (Lights).

Alexa, Google Home and Siri

Once a light is in Home Assistant you can run it from a voice assistant like any other Home Assistant light. The box itself knows nothing about this; Home Assistant does it all.

• Go to Settings → Voice assistants. The Expose tab is where you choose which entities each assistant may see. Pick your amble-home lights there.
• Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant connect through Home Assistant Cloud (a paid subscription, set up on that same page), or through the manual routes described in the Alexa and Google Assistant integration docs, which need a developer account with each company.
• Siri and the Apple Home app connect through the HomeKit Bridge integration (Settings → Devices & services → Add integration → HomeKit Bridge). It is free and entirely local: Home Assistant shows a QR code, you scan it in the Home app on an iPhone on the same network, and the lights appear there. Diagnostic entities are left out by default; the lights are included.
• Matter: the box is not a Matter device and does not need to be. If you run a Matter bridge in Home Assistant it can carry these lights too, like any others.

A known gap

Home Assistant's device page shows no "Visit" link to the box's own pages. ESPHome only advertises one for its full web server, which the box deliberately does not run because its controls would let the box control lights. Bookmark http://amble-home-xxxxxx.local/, or add a link card to a dashboard. An upstream request to ESPHome is open as an idea.