Adding Wifi to a Dumb RGB Light Bulb

Many years ago I had bought a RGB led bulb off amazon to try out, when there really wasnt a smart bulb market. After collecting dust more many years it has found a use! I moved into a new apartment and the foyer light was burnt out, i tried like 4 different LED and non-LED bulbs, and this cheapo RGB bulb was the only one that worked.

Problem with this bulb is when you turn it on, it comes on red and you have to use the IR remote to change it to white....  I really dont want to use a remote, so time for an upgrade. Luckily I had a ESP micro laying around, specifically a Wemos D1 mini. This is also a great opportunity to add another device to my home automation system. The plan is to have this device communicate using MQTT to a raspberry pi running Openhab.

Steps to put a new brain in the light bulb:

• Pull off plastic cap, pry original PCB from aluminum housing(just glued down with some sort of thermal glue).
• De-solder the original IC, oscillator, and IR receiver led.
• Wire the original DC power wires into the wemos and add new power wires between wemos and led board.
• Add 3 wires between wemos and led board for red, green, and blue control.
• Program custom code(Github link). I used the Arduino IDE and the following libraries:
• ESP Wifi
• MQTT
• OTA downloads

Board stack showing wemos under RGB led board.

Wires soldered onto the pads of the existing IC.

Update: In retrospect I should have just used the really nice tasmota software available for free and created a custom config.