An engineer has taken an unusually adversarial approach to the problem of his smart light being hacked by a neighbour, by reverse engineering the light’s main board and replacing it with his own firmware on an ESP32C6 microcontroller, all documented in a six-part series.
The replacement works with the Philips Hue hub via Zigbee, using PWM functions to ensure the same functionality as the original.
Open-sourcing the firmware and PCB under GPL v3 allows others to replicate the solution.
This is arguably preferable to using a dumb light switch, which the author notes is still needed to override the smart functions in case of failure or hijacking, echoing a distinction between tech enthusiasts and engineers, the latter being more reluctant to embrace the Internet of Things.
