I have recently enforced a better privacy practice for my smart home devices, that includes creating a new access point for those devices and blocking them of internet access with VLAN.
Since then, my yeelight minas celiing lights goes unavailable whenever I physically switch them off and turn them on afterwards.
One really stupid thing is it needs internet access for using LAN control feature. it’s really really dumb.
but at the same time, in this kind of age where everything wants to phone their home, i need to somehow mitigate this in every possible way such as by fooling the devices as if they have access to the internet.
Is this kind of things possible?
thanks!
Yeah I think the right response is to return the lightbulb and get a new one. One that doesn’t require an internet connection. Build some market pressure in the direction of offline appliances
For a camera I’ve got that I don’t care too much about, I had to give it a ~50KB network connection out and then it gets its handshake, but, doesn’t have a good enough connection to actually upload video and then all the local features stay working. Eventually, I’ll replace it, but, it’s monitoring a place that I don’t care about too much, so, it’s low on the priority list.
Unfortunately, a light doesn’t need much in the way of a connection to begin with, but, if it needs some kind of handshake, maybe you can watch the traffic with Wireshark and whitelist that specific traffic or see if someone else has done the work for it (a quick search didn’t show anything for me, but, I haven’t gone in depth or anything)
Go zigbee! I was very hesistant running a second wireless network next to wifi, but it’s widely supported and totally cloud-free
I understand the benefits of zigbee. However, its regional availability is poor. In my country acquiring zigbee hub(?) without going for sketchy options is not feasible.
What is a sketchy option?
I just bought a Sonoff Zigbee Dongle Plus E and use ZHA and it works like a charm. No third party cloud based coordinator. I guess you still have to trust the firmware of the dongle, but that is about it.
I simply have not access to zigbee dongle except for on sketchy Chinese websites. I usually buy those kinds of devices from Amazon.
I mean - the ones you can buy from Amazon are the same you buy from Aliexpress, just more expensive. Of course, one could fear that some of them have failed QA or whatever - but I would not have much reason to suspect malicious firmware - and if you do, you can flash your own. You do that anyway if you want to use the dongle as a Zigbee router (instead of coordinator).
In my region, it’s near impossible to receive packages from Aliexpress bc their delivery service is not functioning. I’ve tried in the past. It’s sketchy not because the QC and all but because I can’t even receive the package while Amazon has never failed delivery at least.
