Yeelight in Home Assistant: HACS, Custom Components, MiIO

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Yeelight makes some of the most affordable color-tunable bulbs on the market - the YLDP13YL Color bulb retails around $15 - but the Yeelight cloud service has had reliability issues, and Xiaomi's app ecosystem is scattered. Running Yeelight through Home Assistant solves both problems. You get local control, instant response times, and full automation flexibility. This guide leans into the advanced path: HACS, community custom components, and the python-miio route for broader Xiaomi support. If you only need the plain native integration and the LAN Control toggle, our shorter Yeelight local setup guide gets you there in ten minutes.

What You Need Before You Start

Before touching Home Assistant, you need a few things in order. First, your Yeelight devices must be on firmware that supports LAN control. Most bulbs manufactured after 2019 do. Second, your Home Assistant instance should be running version 2024.1 or later - the built-in Yeelight integration improved significantly that release.

Third, and this surprises a lot of people: you need to enable LAN control in the Yeelight app before Home Assistant can discover the devices. That step is easy to miss.

Here's the quick checklist before you begin:

• Yeelight devices on firmware that supports LAN control (most post-2019 bulbs)
• Home Assistant running version 2024.1 or newer
• LAN Control enabled in the Yeelight app for each device
• Devices and Home Assistant on the same local network
• A reserved IP for each bulb, which keeps discovery stable

Enabling LAN Control in the Yeelight App

Open the Yeelight app and tap on your device. Go to the device settings (the three-dot menu, top right). Scroll down until you see "LAN Control" and toggle it on. Repeat for every Yeelight device you want to control locally.

Once LAN control is on, the device starts broadcasting itself on your network. Home Assistant can then discover it automatically or via manual IP entry.

Does the Built-in Integration Work Without HACS?

Yes - Home Assistant ships with a native Yeelight integration since version 2021.4. You don't need HACS for basic color, brightness, and on/off control. Go to Settings > Devices & Services > Add Integration and search for "Yeelight." If LAN control is enabled on your bulbs, Home Assistant discovers them automatically within a minute or two.

The native integration handles color temperature, RGB color, brightness, and smooth transitions. For most users, this is everything they need.

HACS adds value only if you want extra features like music mode, custom effects, or the newer custom component maintained by the community. I've found the native integration stable enough for daily use.

How to Install via HACS (Optional)

If you want the HACS version for extra capabilities, here's how to install it.

First, install HACS itself if you haven't already. Navigate to hacs.xyz and follow the installation instructions for your Home Assistant setup. The process takes about five minutes and requires SSH or the Terminal add-on.

Once HACS is installed, open it from the Home Assistant sidebar. Click the three-dot menu and select "Custom Repositories." Add https://github.com/rytilahti/python-miio if you want broader Xiaomi device support, or search HACS for "Yeelight" to find community integrations.

After adding the repository, restart Home Assistant. Then go to Settings > Devices & Services and add the Yeelight integration again - this time it will use the HACS version.

Assigning Static IPs to Your Yeelight Devices

This step saves you a lot of frustration. Yeelight devices can change IP addresses when your router reassigns DHCP leases. When that happens, Home Assistant loses the connection and your automations break.

Fix this by assigning static IPs in your router's DHCP reservation settings. Find the MAC address for each Yeelight device (it's visible in the Yeelight app under device info), then reserve a permanent IP for it in your router admin panel. A range like 192.168.1.150-199 works well for smart home devices.

After reserving IPs, update your Home Assistant Yeelight integration entries to use the static IP addresses. Go to Settings > Devices & Services > Yeelight and click Configure on each device.

Local Control vs Cloud: What's the Real Difference?

Local control means your Home Assistant server talks directly to the bulb over your home network. No internet required. Response time drops from 200-800ms (cloud) to 20-50ms (local). Automations work during internet outages.

Cloud control routes every command through Yeelight's servers in China. That adds latency and means if Yeelight's service is down - which happened several times in 2023 - your lights stop responding to automations.

For bedroom wake-up lights or kitchen automation triggers, that 150ms difference in response time is actually noticeable. Local control feels instant. Cloud control feels sluggish on a busy network.

Setting Up Automations with Yeelight in Home Assistant

Once your bulbs appear in Home Assistant, creating automations is straightforward. Here are three that work well with Yeelight hardware.

Sunrise simulation: Use a time trigger set to 30 minutes before sunrise (Home Assistant calculates this automatically from your location). Start the bulb at 1% brightness and 2700K warm white, then use a helper to gradually increase brightness to 80% over 20 minutes. The Yeelight YLDP13YL handles color temperature transitions smoothly.

Motion-triggered hallway light: Pair a motion sensor (a Zigbee one works well) with a Yeelight bulb in the hallway. Set brightness to 30% after 10pm so it's not blinding at night. Add a 3-minute timeout to turn off automatically.

TV ambiance mode: When your media player entity changes to "playing," set the living room Yeelight to a dim warm color. When it pauses or stops, return to normal brightness. This works with any media player integrated into Home Assistant.

Troubleshooting Common Yeelight Issues

The most common problem is devices showing as "unavailable" in Home Assistant. Nine times out of ten, the cause is either a missing static IP assignment or LAN control getting reset after a firmware update. Check both before assuming something is broken.

If discovery doesn't work at all, make sure your Home Assistant server and your Yeelight devices are on the same network subnet. A mesh router that puts IoT devices on a separate VLAN will block discovery unless you enable mDNS or add explicit IP addresses.

Firmware updates in the Yeelight app can sometimes disable LAN control. After any Yeelight app update, verify that LAN control is still toggled on for each device.

Useful Yeelight Automation Ideas

Once your bulbs respond locally, the fun part is building automations that actually improve daily life rather than just showing off. A few that have stuck in my own setup are worth stealing.

A sunrise alarm is the obvious one, and Yeelight's color-tunable bulbs handle it well. Set an automation that slowly ramps a bedroom bulb from a dim 2000K amber to a brighter 4000K over 20 minutes before your alarm. Waking to gradually increasing light is genuinely gentler than a blaring phone, and because it runs locally in Home Assistant, it fires even if your internet is down overnight.

Motion-triggered hallway lighting is another favorite. Pair a cheap Zigbee motion sensor with a Yeelight strip and set it to come on at 15 percent after midnight, so a 2am trip to the kitchen doesn't blind you with full brightness. During the day the same sensor can trigger 100 percent instead.

Adaptive lighting ties the whole house together. The Home Assistant Adaptive Lighting integration shifts your Yeelight bulbs warmer and dimmer as the evening progresses, mimicking natural light and easing the jump to sleep. It's the kind of automation you set once and then quietly benefit from every night.

Performance: Local vs Cloud in Practice

The difference is night and day once you switch. Through the Yeelight cloud, a command can take a second or more to reach the bulb, and it fails entirely during an outage. Running locally over LAN control, the response is effectively instant, usually under 100 milliseconds, and it never depends on a server you don't control. For automations that fire dozens of times a day, that responsiveness is the whole reason to do this.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does enabling LAN control break the Yeelight app? No. You can keep using the Yeelight app alongside Home Assistant. LAN control simply opens a local port so Home Assistant can talk to the bulb directly. The cloud features still work if you want them.

Why does Home Assistant sometimes lose my Yeelight bulbs? Almost always a DHCP issue. When the router hands a bulb a new IP address, Home Assistant can lose track of it. The fix is to reserve a static IP for each bulb in your router settings, which keeps the connection stable for good.

Do all Yeelight models support local control? Most made after 2019 do, but not every one. Older or region-specific models occasionally ship with LAN control disabled at the firmware level. Check the toggle in the Yeelight app first, and if it isn't there, a firmware update sometimes adds it.

Is it worth moving Yeelight off the cloud if everything already works? If your automations are simple and reliability hasn't bitten you, maybe not. But the moment you depend on lights for a morning routine or security lighting, local control pays for the one-time setup effort. You stop trusting a remote server with something you need to just work, every single day.