Controlling Tuya devices locally using Node-Red

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Controlling Tuya devices locally using Node-Red

This post is written as part of an assignment for the HAN University of Applied Sciences. This is also part of a few other projects I am posting.
Other guides can be found here:
Two Zigbee Networks Joined over a wireguard VPN: Two Zigbee Networks joined over a Wireguard VPN
Connecting long range sensors using LoRa and MQTT: Connecting long range sensors using LoRa and MQTT

This guide presumes that you have some basic knowledge of using Home-Assistant and that Home-Assistant is already installed. I am not liable for broken devices, broken configuration, thermonuclear war or ANYTHING ELSE. This guide is provided as is. Nonetheless I hope you find it interesting :smiley:

Introduction

A long time ago, once close to christmas I bought LSC chirstmas ligths in the hope I could connect them to my Home Assistant installation, however this turned out to be quite challenging. I have compiled everything I learned from that experience in this guide and used the christmas lights as an example.

Tuya

Tuya is chinese manufacturer which makes a lot of smarthome equipment. A lot of cheap smarthome equipment is based on Tuya devices. For example in the Netherlands devices from the Lidl and Action almost always use Tuya Devices exclusively. The Lidl and Action smarthome apps are also based on the Tuya App.

Tuya chips

Quite a while ago Tuya devices switched from using ESP based chips to their own produced chips. This makes it impossible to flash existing devices with for example an ESPHome solution. Instead of just changing the chip, this post aims to get to a solution without changing any hardware or firmware and controlling the existing Tuya firmware from software locally without a cloud solution.

Node-RED

Node-RED is a node based node based programming tool which works with topic and messages. More information can be found here

Local Tuya/ Tuya intergration

Basic devices like switches and lights can be controlled using the Tuya integration or Local Tuya integration. I would recommend using the Local Tuya integration and try and see if that would solve your problem. I use it myself to control a couple of switches and like it very much. However there are some Tuya devices that have alternative datapoint settings and aren’t supported using the normal Tuya integration or Local Tuya.

Local Tuya integration can be installed using the HACS store and can be found here:

Prerequisites

In this guide several tools are used to extract keys, determining datapoints and controlling the Tuya devices. To follow this guide it is required to use a rooted android device or the use an emulator. If you want to extract the keys without making a Tuya developer account. It does still require a tuya or smartlife account.

What Why Optional Where to Find
Node-Red Making Flows No (duh) Add-On store HomeAssistant: Home Assistant Community Add-on: Node-RED
HACS Getting Node-RED Companion No Website: Download | HACS
Node-Red Companion Reading entities No HACS: GitHub - zachowj/hass-node-red: Companion Component for node-red-contrib-home-assistant-websocket to help integrate Node-RED with Home Assistant Core
Hass-virtual Creating an entity in HA No HACS: GitHub - twrecked/hass-virtual: Virtual Components for Home Assistant
Node-Red Tuya node Controlling Tuya Devices No Node-Red Settings: https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-tuya-smart-device
Python3 Installing Tiny Tuya No Website: Download Python | Python.org
TinyTuya Testing Datapoints No Can be instaled using pip install tinytuya, More info: tinytuya · PyPI
Smartlife 3.6.1 app Extracting Tuya keys Yes APK-Mirror: Smart Life - Smart Living 3.6.1 (arm-v7a) (Android 4.1+) APK Download by Volcano Technology Limited - APKMirror
Bluestacks 5 Extracting Tuya keys Yes Website: https://www.bluestacks.com/ Can also be downloaded from the bstweaker site.
Bluestacks Tweaker Extracting Tuya keys Yes Website: https://bstweaker.tk/ (select download 2)

Node-RED

Since this entire guide is aimed at Node-Red you need it. It can be directly installed from inside Home Assistant from Settings -> Add-Ons -> Add-On Store -> Node-RED

HACS

HACS stands for: Home Assistant Community Store. It is aimed at providing user created integrations for everyone to install. To install HACS follow this guide.

Node-RED Companion

Node-RED companion is used to control components from home assistant as nodes in Node-RED. More info can be found here

Hass-virtual

Hass-Virtual is a custom integration and can be used to make fake entities in home-assistant. This can be used as an alternative of using templates. I like it personally since it is very easy to configure and is very usable with Node-RED.

Node-Red Tuya node

The Node module name is: node-red-contrib-tuya-smart-device and can be installed in the node-red settings by putting the module name into npm_packages
This is a node that gives access to the tuya device by specifying the id, key and ip address of the devices. With this node datapoints can be set using flows.

Python3

For using TinyTuya, TinyTuya is a python library. For Windows you can download from the website. For linux you can use the package manager of your distro. For mac you can use brew or macports

TinyTuya

TinyTuya is a python library and can be used for controlling python devices. It can be installed using the python package manager: Pip. To install TinyTuya use the command: pip install tinytuya

Optional Components

The following tools are used for retrieving tuya keys and getting the datapoints. There are also other ways to get the Tuya keys with Tuya local. This however involves creating a developer account on the Tuya Developer website. Datapoints can also be found and set using Tuya Local, however I didn’t find this intuitive.

Smartlife 3.6.1 app

The Smartlife app is a clone of the tuya application. This specific version of the app contains a bug which dumps the local keys of the device when connecting the device to the app. However to get these keys it requires you to have a rooted android device since that part of storage is inaccessible.

Bluestacks 5 and BlueStacks Tweaker

These are only required to have if you are not willing to root you android phone or don’t have an android phone. This will be used to install the smartlife app and extract the keys

Step 1 - Tuya keys

To control Tuya devices locally the first step is to extract the local keys. There are essentially two ways of getting the Tuya keys from devices.

Method 1

One way to get the keys is to create a Tuya Developer account and couple the devices to that account. You can extract the keys that way. I found it cumbersome to use, however the method has become easier to use since the last time I have tried it. A comprehensive guide can be found on the github page of the Local Tuya HACS component here

Method 2

Another method is to use the Smartlife 3.6.1 app on a rooted android device. This method is described by Mark Watt Tech in his youtube video which can be found here. It does require you to create a (throwaway) smartlife account.
I will give a short summary here for the sake of having some written steps. I presume you use a windows machine with BlueStacks and BlueStack Tweaker already installed

  1. Install the Smartlife 3.6.1 apk inside bluestacks and the smartlife app on your phone.
  2. Start the app on your phone and create a smartlife account.
  3. Connect the Tuya devices to your smartlife account.
  4. Start the smartlife app on bluestacks and login with your account and wait for your devices to load.
  5. Close the app and exit bluestacks. They keys are now extracted.
  6. Open Bluestacks tweaker and click on File Manager
  7. Navigate to data/data/com.tuya.smartlife/shared_prefs/
  8. Copy the key file with numbers attached. It looks somehting like this preferences_global_keyeu1545...xml DO NOT USE preferences_global_key.xml
  9. Open the file in a text editor search for LocalKey and look for the entry. You can also use the tool made by Mark on his github which extracts the keys automatically that can be found here

Step 2 - Finding Datapoints

Tuya devices use datapoints this means that there is a number with a corresponding value. That value can be a number a string or anything device specific.
To get the datapoints we use TinyTuya to read out the state of the device.
For this step we are going to use TinyTuya and the smartlife app we installed earlier.

Look at the prerequisites for installing TinyTuya. Once TinyTuya is installed you should use python -m tinytuya scan to scan for devices. Don’t actively connect to the device at that moment with the smartlife app. If it is not picked up try to powercycle the device without using the smartlife app.

When you have found the device write down the Device ID and IP Address. We will need them for the next step including with the local key we found earlier.
To get the datapoints we have to use a python script like this:

import tinytuya

device = tinytuya.Device('DEVICE_ID', 'IP_ADDRESS', 'LOCAL_KEY')
device.set_version(TUYA_VERSION)
status = device.status()
dps = device.detect_available_dps() 
print('Device status: %r\n' % data)
print('DPS Availible: %r\n' % data)

This script is also available from my github page here

To get datapoints from the device do the following:

  1. Open the smartlife app and turn on the device
  2. Close the app
  3. Run the python script
  4. Repeatedly run the script with cycling through all the settings that are available for the device
  5. Write down every setting that is possible for every datapoint.

Example

When trying this out on my christmas lights I get the following output and

$ getinfo.py
Device status {'devId': 'DEVICE_ID', 'dps': {'20': True, '101': 'Color', '102': 'Stream'}, 't': 577}
Available DPS{'20': None, '101': None, '102': None}

Here we can see the datapoints that the device uses.
For every datapoint the following modes are available:

Datapoint 20 101 102
Mode True Color Bright
False R Gradually
G Star
B Flower
RG Marquee
RB Fireworks
GB Meteor
RGB Stream

Now we know everything from the tuya device we need to know

Step 3 - Virtual Device

Using the HACS virtual device integration it is very easy to create a fake entity in Home Assistant. To see all supported entities visit the github page here

Example

For the christmas lights I configured the modes according to the datapoints as follow in my lights.yaml:

- platform: virtual
  name: "Christmas Lights"
  initial_value: "on"
  initial_brightness: 100
  support_color: true
  initial_color: [0, 100]
  support_effect: true
  initial_effect: "Stream"
  initial_effect_list:
    [
      "Bright",
      "Gradually",
      "Star",
      "Flower",
      "Marquee",
      "Fireworks",
      "Meteor",
      "Stream",
    ]

This creates an entity inside Home Assistant after a restart

Step 4 - Node-Red Flow

This step is very specific to your application and device that you are using. Atleast two nodes are required to hook up the virtual device and the tuya device. For getting the data from virtual device the state node is required. For controlling the tuya device tuya-smart-device node is required.
The state node requires the virtual device entity to which should be filled in the Entity field.
The tuya node requires the Device ID or IP Address and the Local Key from earlier.

Example

The flow for my christmas lights can be found on my github page here

My Flow looks like this:

Christmas Lights Flow
Christmas Lights Flow1144×495 36.1 KB

A brief explanation for my christmas lights is as follows:\

  1. The data is extracted from the virtual device.
  2. RGB colordata is translated to the datapoint settings
    • For example a red value above 200 sets datapoint 101 to R, the same applies for green and blue
  3. The mode selected is directly translated to datapoint 102
  4. On and Off is translated to True and False in datapoint 20
  5. All functions and filter ares joined and sent to the tuya node.

Bugs

  • Tuya devices can be buggy sometimes. For example setting multiple datapoints at once can be buggy at times. Sometimes the datapoint has to be resend to have the effect applied.
  • If the state changes from off to on while it has been a long time since it has been used the device can forget the color and mode settings it had. This is something you have to keep in mind while designing your flow.
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