Flashing the Light

The AiLight firmware has a feature that allows you to flash the light (i.e switch it on and off at a particular interval). It can only be used by either sending a specific instruction to the MQTT command topic or using the Home Assistant automation component.

How to use

1. Home Assistant

Using Home Assistant's Automation component, you can have your Ai-Thinker LED RGBW light flash by a specified trigger and certain conditions. For example, why not let your Ai-Thinker LED RGBW light flash if somebody presses the button of your Smart Doorbell:

automation:
  - alias: 'Flash the light when front doorbell pressed'
    initial_state: 'on'
    trigger:
      - platform: state
        entity_id: binary_sensor.doorbell
        from: 'off'
        to: 'on'
    action:
      - service: light.toggle
        data:
          entity_id: light.ailight_office
          flash: long
          color: [255, 0, 0]

This will make your Ai-Thinker LED RGBW light flash the colour red for 10 seconds. The 'long' value is a standard Home Assistant value defaults to 10 seconds. There is also a 'short' value which defaults to 5 seconds.

Please check the Home Assistant Automation and Actions documentation pages for more information on how to configure Home Assistant.

2. Using MQTT

You can alternatively flash your Ai-Thinker LED RGBW light by publishing an MQTT message to your MQTT broker. To do that, simply send a JSON message to the MQTT Command Topic set for your Ai-Thinker LED RGBW light.

Example:

{"flash":"5", "color": {"r": 255, "g": 0, "b": 0}}

Using mosquitto_pub:

mosquitto_pub -h <your_mqtt_broker> -t <your_ailight_command_topic> -m '{"flash":"5", "color": {"r": 255, "g": 0, "b": 0}}'

This will make your Ai-Thinker LED RGBW light flash the colour red for 5 seconds.

3. Using the REST API

With the embedded REST API you can control your Ai-Thinker LED RGBW light's features like flashing. Using the cURL client as an example, send the following command to make the light flash:

curl -X PATCH http://<your_ailight_ip_address_or_hostname_here>/api/light -H 'API-Key: <your_api_key_here>' -d '{"flash":"5", "color": {"r": 255, "g": 0, "b": 0}}'

This will make your Ai-Thinker LED RGBW light flash the colour red for 5 seconds.

Checkout the REST API Wiki page on how to use the embedded REST API.

Note: at the moment the light alternates between the specified colour and 'off' with an interval of 500ms. These can only be changed by modifying the source code.