Control My Home Bulb
A recovery project that brought abandoned smart bulbs back to life with Tasmota, MQTT, an Express backend, and a small PWA my dad still uses.
This started with a small frustration at home.
We had smart bulbs that still worked, but the company behind them had shut down. The app disappeared, and good hardware became useless because the software was gone.
I treated it like a recovery job.
What I Built
First, I reflashed the bulbs with Tasmota so they could be controlled locally.
Then my dad asked if he could control them from anywhere. That turned the repair into a real product.
The final system includes:
- Tasmota-flashed bulbs over MQTT
- an Express + TypeScript backend
- live state subscriptions from Tasmota topics
- command publishing for color, temperature, and brightness
- an installable PWA for phone and desktop use
What Mattered
I was not trying to build a full home automation platform.
The right scope was smaller: make one household's lights reliable again, with live state and an interface my dad would actually keep using.
That made the tradeoff easy. Less scope, more usefulness.
Why It Stayed
My dad still uses it.
That is my favorite kind of validation: a real person, a real constraint, and a project that quietly keeps doing its job.