esp8266

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…

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…