tuya – Made by Mikal

Holman CLXRGB60 RGB WiFi garden light controllers and tasmota

Post author:mikal
Post published:March 25, 2023
Post category:Electronics

Today I went forth to Bunnings in the rain to purchase a Holman CLXRGB60 RGB garden light controller so that I too could have fancy lighting in my garden and impress all those guests I never have over. I had been given hope by the Blakadder site that I would be able to flash tasmota onto the controller so it integrated with my Home Assistant home automation. Unfortunately, it was not to be. Despite the device being TYWE3L based, the warning on the blakaddr site was correct, and this is a next-gen Tuya device where the crypto hasn't been broken yet. Then again, I couldn't even get this device to pair in the Holman app, so it clearly hates me. This unfortunately means the excellent instructions from Jon Oxer were unforunately not helpful today. I think there is a theoretical option here to flash using the serial pins on the board, ala this guide. Also, it means my hair got wet for nothing. So as to take revenge for my wet hair I have decided to pivot. The Holman lights seem quite well made, but they're just 12 volt RGB PWM devices. So I can use their lights and build…

Hacking on Arlec Christmas lights with tasmota

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 25, 2019
Post category:HomeAssistant

I'm loving the wide array of electrically certified home automation devices we're seeing now. Light bulbs, sensors, power boards, and even Christmas lights. Specifically Arlec is shipping these app controllable Christmas lights this year, which looked very much like they should work with Tasmota. (Sorry for the terrible product picture, I can't find this product online any more, I suspect Bunnings has sold out for the year?) Specifically, it turns out that these Arlec lights are an ESP8266 which can be flashed with tuya-convert v2 to run tasmota. Once flashed, you can control all of the functions available on the device itself, although there are parts of the protocol I haven't fully understood yet. Let's start off by flashing the device: First off boot your raspberry pi with tuya-convert. I used v2, and I suspect that's important here so make sure you upgrade if you're using something old. Next, put the bud lights into programming mode by holding the button on the control box down until the light strand turns off. Release and the strand should start blinking every couple of seconds. Now run the tuya-convert flashing script. Now go to the tasmota-XXXX essid and enter your wifi details into…

Brilliant Smart Wifi plug with Tasmota

Post author:mikal
Post published:March 26, 2019
Post category:HomeAssistant

A couple of weeks ago I was playing with Tuya derived smart light globes (Mirabella Genio from K-Mart Australia in my case, but there are a variety of other options as well). Now Bunnings has the Brillant Smart Wifi Plug on special for $20 and I decided to give that a go as well, given it is also Tuya derived. The basic procedure for OTA flashing was the same as flashing the globes, except that you hold down the button on the device for five seconds to put it into flash mode. That all worked brilliantly, until I appear to have fat fingered my wifi details in Tasmota -- when I rebooted the device it never appeared on my network. That would be much more annoying on the globes, but it turns out these smart plugs are really easy to open and that Tuya has documented the pin out of the controlling microprocessor. So, I ended up temporarily soldering some cables to the microprocessor to debug what had gone wrong. It should be noted that as a soldering person I make a great software engineer: Once you've connected with a serial console, its pretty obvious who can't be trusted to…

Mirabella Genio smart lights with Tasmota and Home Assistant

Post author:mikal
Post published:March 8, 2019
Post category:HomeAssistant

One of the things I like about Home Assistant is that it allows you to take hardware from a bunch of various vendors and stitch it together into a single consistent interface. So for example I now have five home automation vendor apps on my phone, but don't use any of them because Home Assistant manages everything. A concrete example -- we have Philips Hue lights, but they're not perfect. They're expensive, require a hub, and need to talk to a Philips data centre to function (i.e. the internet needs to work at my house, which isn't always true thanks to the failings of the Liberal Party). I'd been meaning to look at the cheapo smart lights from Kmart for a while, and finally got around to it this week. For $15 you can pickup a dimmable white globe, and for $29 you can have a RGB one. That's heaps cheaper than the Hue options. Even better, the globes are flashable to run the open source Tasmota stack, which means no web services required! So here are some instructions on flashing these globes to be useful: Buy the globes. I bought this warm while dimmable and this RBG option. Flash to…