Goodbye Tuya it really hasn't been great knowing you.

-

Over the last few months I have been playing with esp32 and esp8266 devices. For those that don't know, one of these amazing chips is embedded in practically every smart device you own, your lights your sockets, anything you control from the smartlife app on your phone/tablet probably has one of these things.

These wonderful little chips run a program that you can upload to them and that can be any program. My pet project at the moment has been "BigButton".


The code for this lives here:

https://github.com/marsjupiter1/bigbutton

The idea is that disabled kids can use it as a device to control a socket, which might control a light, or act as an alarm, it's actually quite surprising the uses you can make of a single button with an LED in it!

Anyhow I digress, almost all of the devices you buy such as smart sockets are integrated with the tuya cloud service rather then being controlled over the the local network.

I have been making open source contributions to help control them both via the cloud and via the the local network.

https://github.com/marsjupiter1/node-red-contrib-tuya-auth

https://github.com/marsjupiter1/ArduinoTuya

The problems though are two fold, to control a socket the parents of children who get these devices are going to have to go through a doable but convoluted process of getting credentials to control the sockets they own.

Secondly with the best will in the world I'm struggling to get really reliable local connections, so the majority of control has to be via the cloud with the lag and dependency that creates.

The whole thing seems a stupid hassle for all involved.

So is there an answer? It turns out there is, you don't absolutely have to buy Tuya devices, there is are open source alternatives EspHome and Tasmota. If you are really adventurous and a little lucky you can even convert old Tuya devices.

I have gone with Tasmota and the simple route of simply buying Tasmota sockets and what I get for that is a simple http API I can talk reliably with the socket without any external credentials.  This works so easily and reliably I feel slightly foolish for the vast numbers of hours put into supporting a Chinese cloud service. It's quite funny to think really, we gen quite a lot of anti China propaganda whilst stuffing our homes with devices China could brick at a whim.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A reliable tuya authentication in node-red

-
In passing when working with tuya and node-red I had a couple of issues, the first one was conflicts with node-red-contrib-crypto-js-dynamic and node-red-contrib-crypto-js. node-red just doesn't seem clever when it comes to duplicate node names. In this example I have replaced the "hmac" function with a copy called mj_hmac. This can be replaced with the hmac from node-red-contrib-crypto-js-dynamic or failing that you will be unable to pass the tuya secret key as a parameter and will have to enter it in the hmac node dialog. The second issue is that tuya authorisation is on a fixed timeout of two hours.  If you refresh the key at 1 hour and 59 minutes it will only be valid for 1 minute. This flow keeps track of the time remaining and refreshes just after expiry. I have not seen errors since. However as a backup plan I do have sub flows that if they see an error reauthenticate. If anyone is reading and interested I can post them as well. [ { "id" : &qu
Read more

Arduino boards - what I wish I'd known when starting

-
 Arduino boards are an alternative to raspberry pi boards, for projects that involve custom hardware IO. For example a simple thermistor attached to take temperatures. For that kind of application a full blown computer like the standard raspberry pi range is obviously massive overkill. Well frankly for the purpose of reading a thermistor so is Arduino.  But they are cheap as chips. My starting point was 3x esp32 boards for £21.95 with inbuilt wifi and bluetooth. It's hard to argue at those prices. The boards are at that price clones, but that's the point really, it is an open hardware standard. As such there are a great number of variants. Code written for builtin wifi won't be quite the same for a board where you have added a wifi shield. So how do you program them? Remarkably the default language supported by the public IDE is C++ and as an important note, if you download this for windows, get the full version don't get what the Microsoft store offers you, it lacks ev
Read more

node-red a full home automation example

-
 I'm not putting this publicly on github quite yet, though feel free to ask. It is my attempt to put my home automation on a dashboard integrated with Alexa, Logitech Harmony and in these days of scary fuel bills my solar panels and consumption monitoring smart plugs. You may or may not want my flows in all their glory, it is my house after all, but the following bits are of note. A reliable Tuya authentication mechanism. Solax solar cloud REST reading. A much extended set of harmony remote integration nodes compared to the original node-red-contrib-harmony repository I forked from. A way to read whether a Virgin TV box is on or off so a power toggle can be sent correctly. Hue lights control. Nothing special but might be easier than starting from scratch. A more useful version of the "sum" node that helps with power aggregation functions. Examples of using the alexa-node-red package so I can talk to Alexa and start node-red flows. A flow to turn an immersion heater on whe
Read more