Here in the UK the supermarket chain Lidl have recently been selling some very reasonably priced home automation gear. I believe they’ve been doing so across Europe. It’s all unbranded kit from Tuya, save for the “SilverCrest” branded hub which… well, it’s another Tuya device.
And you can see why! Tuya offer an IoT point-and-click product development platform where resellers can design their product range, rebrand the Tuya Smart Life app with their own logo and market their own product range (no doubt harvesting marketable user data in the process).
The products aren’t perfect, but they give Trådfri a very good run for the money and are all ZigBee 3.0, though they can be a bit twitchy, particularly with RGB control. They offer a variety of RGBCW lamps where R, G, or B at 100% is as bright as cold or warm white at 1%. Not a patch on the Hive RGBCW lamp I have for mucking about with, but then they’re more than 4x cheaper.
They apparently play well with Hue hubs, so I’ve picked one up for £20 on eBay. My accessories mesh on Hubitat starts dropping Xiaomi gear with the lamps connected and with no battery backup they’re not going near the security mesh.
Also, I didn’t realise you could have local control of a Hue hub via Homebridge. Very nice.
Following up on this, the Hue hub arrived and I’ve been really surprised. Having never looked into it due to the expense of the accessories I had assumed it was a very online, cloud-based system. It’s really not. The Hue hub checked for a firmware update and that was it - no account setup, no cloud nonsense, just the iOS app searching for it locally.
Combine that with CoCoHue (as the native Hue integration for Hubitat doesn’t support scenes or XY colour, which the Tuya Zigbee lamps require) and I’m controlling Hue scenes using AlertMe and Xiaomi buttons through Hubitat, completely locally.
The real bonus of the Hue hub is it keeps all of these normally problematic lamps off my Hubitat meshes. How exactly it is able to merrily keep all these devices happy, which would previously fall over at the drop of a hat, I have no idea. But it does.
I’ve not tried the Tuya/Lidl bulbs but I did acquire an extension lead today, three individually addressable sockets plus four USB points for £20. Paired immediately and seems very responsive, if it maintains a steady connection then I’ll be more than happy.
As to lighting, when I first switched to hubitat from smartthings there were quite a few issues with my mesh which pushed me to find a used Hue hub (they’re not waterproof if anyone is wondering…) which then lead to investing in a new replacement bundle on black Friday a few months after it died (the problems reappeared). All lighting (a mixture of hue and tradfri) is running via the hue hub with hubitat managing logic.
Ha, me too. I couldn’t resist. Not tried it yet, do you have it paired straight to Hubitat? Any particular driver required or does it work as a generic switch?
I’m seriously considering getting a couple more tomorrow, finances be damned.
It’s paired straight to hubitat using the “nue zigbee switch” native driver. Once paired, click “configure” and it will generate child devices corresponding to each socket, enabling you to address them individually.
I’ll miss the presence feature in @markus’ drivers for the tradfri outlets but the form factor works really well for me compared to a dumb extension populated with bulky single units.
I’ll see if I can get it working - I’m a big user of the presence feature for notifying me of issues, so if I can bungle my own driver together with that baked in too I will do.
Aye, same here. I’ve done a little hacking around with code on this hub but beyond modifying a few things to suit niche purposes it’s been minimal, I’ve not actually looked at it yet. I’m more comfortable with spanners or a soldering iron than a keyboard these days.
I possibly peaked too early, my last really major piece of homebrewed software was an NPC generator and campaign manager for AD&D. It didn’t even have the word “edition” in the title at that point…
@Tarmacsurfer my Generic Zigbee Switch driver have support for multiple relays in one device and should work with your device in a similar manner to the built-in Nue Zigbee Switch driver.
Completely forgot to post back here, but I did make a driver for the extension. You can fetch it from that link or search for “tuya” in Hubitat Package Manager.