Milight sells 2.4 GHz remotes* for quite cheap (~$12) which can be used to control Milight bulbs*. They also make in-wall panels* that do the same thing. These work quite well, but if you’re using something like HASS, you’ll end up with stale state. For example, if you turn lights on with the remote, that change won’t be reflected in HASS.

I recently released v1.4.0 of esp8266_milight_hub which allows you to use Milight remotes in conjunction with HomeAssistant, or any other platform that works with MQTT. Here’s some footage of it in action:

The ESP8266 is passively listening for packets sent by the remote, and forwards the data to an MQTT topic. HASS reacts by sending commands to a different MQTT topic which instructs the ESP8266 to turn bulbs on. You could just as easily have HASS do something completely different, like control a non-Milight bulb.

If you’re interested in setting this up yourself, instructions are available GitHub project wiki.