my power question was about the controller in "normal use" if it really was as "flexible" in terms of power supply voltage to run it and the LED strips as the printing on the device suggests.
I'm not sure about that. I've drilled small holes in cabinetry to fit the DC jack into, but you may be able to power it by USB. As long as the specs are similar to the DC converter I suspect you'll be OK.
Mine was a "snap fit" with four tabs on the side-corners and recesses in the top section. I just pried at the corners until one of the tabs popped out, then it was easy pop out the other three tabs.
Yes, most of them are like this. Just a tricky matter because sometimes you can accidentally rip a glued wired off the board. The first one is definitely the hardest! Once you figure out a method that works for you, you'll be able to crank them out.
But there is no switch or any indication of what pin to pull "low" to when applying 3.3V power to put it in programming mode.
Yes, this can be tricky/frustrating to figure out. You can see if people have sorted it out for other LED strips as a lot of them may use nearly identical circuitry inside. I would suggest just holding down the button before connecting power. That tends to work more often than not.
Use a volt meter, and drive the device via the normal app/interface, and watch each pin with the volt meter. You should be able to find which pin goes LOW/HIGH or HIGH/LOW as you test. There are not that many pins, which contact points, to check, since the designers of these devices try to only build what they really need. Some devices, actually have a test junction/jumper block, so they can validate the device for QA/QC, this can make it easy to contact flash the device, or find which pins are tasked or what, at least for outputs. Inputs can be a bit tricky to figure out if they are analog.
I may be stuck with using Tuya-convert OTA flashing.
You make it sound like a bad thing ? Tuya convert is fantastic, the only thing you need is a device that can act like an access point (eg raspberry) and some commandline skills. For Tasmotizer and the like need hardware modifications and/or soldering if it is not a straight forward ESP (which it most likely isn't in a commercial product). When i buy commercial chinese products i first check if they are tuya based so i can easily flash them with tasmota without any hardware changes.
The thing that is putting me off though is that the latest version of the Tuya firmware doesn't permit OTA replacement with Tasmota. There doesn't seem to be a reliable way to know which devices will work and which won't.
Agreed. Looking at the comments on tasmota website, it seems to be a bit of a gambling to know if the conversion will work or not.
It seems that the geek route is getting harder.
The shelly RGBW with a dumb LED looks like a safe bet.
Is using the official firmware image, and vendor app (infrastructure) provided by the vendor that evil? I have a firewall, I have traffic flow protection, so I know if these devices are doing anything shady. So far, I have not seen anything odd from the official firmware. Could any given vendor abuse these devices? Sure. But once they are exposed, they are doomed. Yes, the vendor could know when I use the given device(s) and how, but is that of any real interest to anyone? With millions of devices in use? Doubt it.
Milight controllers/receivers are fine, those talk to a hub (ie gateway). The hub could be(come) a potential issue. The hub you can run on an esp in case you want some control. Is not only the abuse, what if they turn off their servers and your lights won't work anymore...
Often it's as big of an issue if the firmware is difficult or near impossible to interface with Node-RED. Custom firmwares very often provide an MQTT interface which is perfect. I have not heard of any other (at least moderately well known) brand products then the ones from Shelly to have MQTT support out of the box.
Yes, using MQTT is completely outside of the business model. The goal of TUYA is to get providers of, vendors of the hardware to develop their apps in the framework TUYA provides. This is a canned solution that virtually guarantees a locked in communication model, with of course TUYA in the middle of every solution.
The above said, my experience has been quite good with TUYA compatible devices, and integrating them to NR. It is only the most recent smart plugs I got about 10 days ago that seem to be difficult to integrate. This is not to say I would not prefer to use a local only, vendor independent solution. But I also just want things to just work, with minor hassle. Custom flashing will only get more difficult over time, and the emphasis on use the official APIs became more explicit.
What needs to happen is a hardware developer/vendor needs to create a specific 'open-source' solution that is better, cheaper, than TUYA can do, which is no small trick. But once that happens, and there is no lock-in scenario, the world will change. And it will, sooner or later someone will release a open-source hardware solution, and it will be a big deal, once they take the profitability out of the market that TUYA now controls.
Maybe someone should start a Kick-Start project for this?
I've got exactly N of 1 experience with these things, but but for the RGB LED strips I have it seems all the LEDs have their anode (+) connected to one pin and all the R G & B cathodes (-) connected to the other three wires of the 4-pin connector.
So a PiZeroW and three (or four for RGBW strips) power mosfets and the opensource software effort has a reasonably priced target.
The supplied controller is impressively small for what it does, but so far I'm not impressed with the displays it can produce. I've not tried the phone app, since I read that it may cause an immediate firmware update that breaks Tuya-convert.
In any event I won't cry if I destroy the controller, I can be happy with code I write and a PiZeroW and a few power transistors.
As to using any "vendor app", call us Luddites, but neither my wife non I want our home or lives controlled by and dependent on a cell phone.
No Kickstarter is going to compete with a mass produced and well established Chinese rebrandable product line.
Edit: although I have to say Shelly has got close enough to Sonoff's prices while having products that appear to have good firmware and also third party certification (based on what I've read or heard). I don't know if they had a Kickstarter or similar first?
Maybe, maybe not - and that's part of the problem. Remember that the service is offered effectively for "free". And when that happens, you can bet that 99% of the time you are paying through some other way. Typically such services are hoovering up connection information and email addresses that then get combined with other online and shopping info to build a profile of you, your family and your household. Sounds like a conspiracy theory I know but sadly it isn't.
Even if you don't mind that and you might not, the other issue is what happens when the vendor gets bored or decides that the product and service isn't earning enough money. They just drop it and you are typically left with a brick. We've seen this time and again from Nest and Google and Amazon not just small players.
And even if you don't care about that, many of us are simply unreformed geeks of the first order We just can't resist doing our own thing and going against the current.
Not necessarily the device. This isn't about some evil empire hacking in and turning your lights on and off to drive you insane. It is all about simple profit. Creative ways to make more money.
Of no interest to the vendor. Of great interest to the global, multi-billion dollar business of aggregate data companies. Each small data point is put together with other small data points to build up a frighteningly accurate picture of your buying habits and interests.
And now, even worse given the level of Machine Learning that can be brought to bear and the number of extreme governments, that commercial data is now also used in conjunction with political imperatives to help destabilise "enemy" countries and track the behaviours of a countries own citizens (and I'm not just talking about China, Russia, etc. The US authorities from the FBI and the Police are all using commercially available aggregate data to avoid needing warrants).
The amount of data collected is gobsmackingly large. And clearly visible in some of the leaked data sources that turn up. Certainly visible in the success of the aggregator companies.
The phrase "you are the product" has never been truer.
Does this have a major impact on your life personally? Maybe, maybe not. Hard to say. Do some of us strongly object to that level of greed and manipulation, most certainly.
Personally, I try to minimise such things. I no longer use Google search or Chrome, I heavily ad-block on all platforms, I've been blocking 3rd-party cookies for some years (the browsers are only now catching up). It is hard to say whether I am a little paranoid because of the security work I've done or whether my natural paranoia (which is minor compared to most security pro's) led me to get involved with security.
I don't go mad though. I just recognise the issue and try to minimise it. Where others comment on adverts following them around the internet, I don't see any at all
Urm - we suddenly seem to have taken a sharp left turn somewhere. Maybe back to the topic?
I agree. If Shelly could slightly bring down the price that would be good. And the Sonoff's seem to have improved in quality over some of the early models but have still kept a nice low price.
At the end of the day, if home automation products are too expensive, I'm just going to walk around the house turning things on and off with a Mark I finger! Did I say that I am a self-adopted Yorkshireman? We are the worst at being tight
Have I implied in anyway, I don't or wouldn't hack the smart devices I have? LOL! I just like having stuff work... until I have to do something nasty. It is why I have a game console, and not a Gaming PC. How I see this, is like when I want to play games, I don't want to have to install the latest GPU firmware and drivers before playing. If my console becomes obsolete? Then I may build a Gaming PC to keep playing the games I want to play, oldie but goodies.
Did you forget to return your tin-foil-hat to your head? JUST KIDDING. I we still have all the power, no matter what they collect, what they push at us, if you have purchase discipline, they are ultimately powerless. Advertising Age published in 1990 or so, that the first generation of internet surfers where so jadded to adverts on web pages that when they interviewed sample groups, over 90% of these kids could not remember most of what the ads were. They had developed automatic tuning out of such. This really had advertising gurus freaking out. Even I can't tell you what a web page ad was about almost all the time, I just turn it out.
Problem is seems many currently shipping devices won't work with Tuya-convert. Setting up a PiZeroW and starting Tuya-convert was easy enough (but a bit time consuming) but running the start-flash.sh fails with:
"Device did not appear with the intermediate firmware."
What was in the log files might as well been in Martian for all the help or usable information in them. My cell phone connected to the vtrust-flash AP without trouble.
The part at the beginning that really made no sense was "Put your IOT device in autoconfig/smartconfig/paring mode (LED will blink fast)." My controller has no LED or buttons of any kind to set a mode.
I'll probably shitcan the controller and just use a PiZeroW and some power MOSFETs to provide PWM voltages for each channel that I can then "animate" with MQTT messages from wherever.
My easy method, I use ESP module, and drive MOSFET breakout boards as need. This is easy, straight forward, provides isolation by design, and has many applications. Garage door controller, sprinkler controller, fan controller, AC controller. And power/reset control of my main PC, etc. I would have done the same for my cable modem, but I had an extra smart plug!
We just can't resist doing our own thing and going against the current.
