Control a £20 bluetooth lightbulb from your linux computer/RPi for fun and profit!
For a home assistant plugin I made that can do this in a more user-friendly way see homeassistant-milight-bluetooth
So I thought it would be cool to have wirelessly controlled lightbulbs in my room. Phillips Hue is /expensive/, especiallt for a poor student like me. Thanks to the magical realm of eBay, I found a cheap chinese unbranded(?) bluetooth-controlled lightbulb for £20. I bought it and installed it. After fiddling around with E27 to bayonet adapters, it was connected!
Now, to control it! I download the android app, and it... kinda works? It manages to crash the bluetooth stack of the phone so badly that I need to adb into it to killall com.android.bluetooth. Well, so it kinda worked but the app is pretty rubbish. And they have no API.
And although the bulb said "MiLight" on the packaging, the MiLight website makes no reference to any bluetooth controlled bulbs. What am I to do?
I used the bluetooth packet logger in android 4.4+ to log bluetooth packets sent/received while using the app. I performed a simple packet replay using gatttool. By obtaining various payloads, I was able to control it from the computer!
I still had no idea what the packet protocol was at this point. You can do this for your own unidentified bulb using the same techniques I used, described in how_to_collect_commands
You can see the commands I collected at this stage in the commands/ folder.
I disassembled the apk and looked through the functions that sent data over Bluetooth (LE, only in 4.0+) and reconstructed the crazy obfuscation algorithm both in forward (createpacket.py) and in reverse (inspectpacket.py) to investigate the actual protocol structure.
It appears that the first byte is a RANDOM NUMBER that is used as a key. The next ten bytes appear to be used as the payload, xor'd with the key and with various constants added on for some reason. Then there is a calculated checksum in the 12th byte.
I detail what I gather about the protocol in protocol_info and feel free to use inspectpacket.py to look at what is going on in the commands present in the commands folder (or adapt it to your own needs) and to generate your own commands using createpacket.py
After even more fiddling about I have assembled useful functionality to change the lightbulb color and brightness in change_color.sh and to change the "temperature" (yellowy white LED) and brightness in change_temp.sh. I also assemble the turn on script in on.sh and turn off light script in off.sh
To use this, you will need to first identify the MAC address and name of your bulb:
hcitool lescan
You will get something like:
$ sudo hcitool lescan
LE Scan ...
44:A6:E5:01:57:CF (unknown)
44:A6:E5:01:57:CF M129617E98C33A86E7
The bit with the colons is the MAC address which you will need (44:A6:E5:01:57:CF) and the bit starting with the M is the device name, which you will need to calculate values from.
You can use getid.py to calculate the two numbers you will need. For example:
$ ./getid.py M129617E98C33A86E7
BULB_ID1=18
BULB_ID2=150
Next, you can insert these numbers into all of the files by executing the commands below (replacing the $BULB_ID1, $BULB_ID2, $BULB_MAC with the values you obtained)
find . -name "*" -exec sed -ri 's/\$BULB_ID1/(first number here)/g' {} ';'
find . -name "*" -exec sed -ri 's/\$BULB_ID2/(second number here)/g' {} ';'
find . -name "*" -exec sed -ri 's/\$BULB_MAC/(bulb mac address here)/g' {} ';'
For example,
find . -name "*" -exec sed -ri 's/\$BULB_ID1/1/g' {} ';'
find . -name "*" -exec sed -ri 's/\$BULB_ID2/2/g' {} ';'
find . -name "*" -exec sed -ri 's/\$BULB_MAC/00:11:22:33:44:55/g' {} ';'
Now, you should be able to turn your light on:
./on.sh
And change colours:
./change_color.sh 60 100
And change the brightness on the same color:
./change_color.sh 60 10
And change it to white:
./change_temp.sh 140 100
And dim the white LED:
./change_temp.sh 140 10
And turn it yellowy:
./change_temp.sh 1 100
Let me know if it works for you!
I have also integrated this into my home automation system based on my raspberry pi so that I can control the lightbulb over wifi rather than bluetooth. Who needs silly dedicated wifi bridges anyway?