FEIT Smart WiFi LED Strips (from Costco) - OTA Jailbreak with Tuya Cloudcutter and OpenBK7231 - Done!

Hardware
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Update:

I have completed this quest. In short, it is now possible to OTA flash this device with OpenBK7231, which has direct support for HomeAssistant via MQTT.

I did have to open one of the devices, dump the firmware and upload it to the Tuya CloudCutter project - so now you don’t have to. The fine folks over there created a new profile (within minutes!) and now it’s possible to flash these device 100% OTA.

As a side benefit, the WiFi performance of these LED strips is drastically better with the OpenBK firmware. The only negative is that the BLE remote that comes with the LED strip no longer works - but all of mine were sitting in a ziplock bag in an IoT storage container anyway - so I don’t care.

I have posted all of the details on the Elektroda forum here.

Shout out to everyone contributing to Tuya Cloudcutter, OpenBK7231, and OpenBekenIoT for their fine work!

Feel free to ping me if you have any questions!

Original post:

It seems that a lot of work has been done over the past year to jailbreak some of the more recent Tuya devices that switched from ESP chips to Beken 7231 chips. The Tuya Cloud integration (obviously) requires cloud access, and Tuya Local is not ideal in a number of ways - for example, if you reset the device, you have to obtain a new set of keys from Tuya cloud. Ooof.

There is a Reddit thread that includes a teardown of the subject LED strip controller - it is definitely a BK7231T chip.

There are at least 2 separate GitHub projects (and associated projects) with custom firmware for these chips, and a Github project with an implementation of a firmware exploit that allows OTA firmware loading:

There is libretuya + esphome which provides for ESP-compatible firmware that can be flashed onto this family of chips.

There is another project called OpenBK7231 with some support for HA & MQTT. Here is an example project with a FEIT RGBCW bulb using this approach.

Finally, there is a project called Tuya Cloudcutter that jailbreaks a number of Tuya devices over the air and allows for OTA firmware loading.

Given all of these ingredients, it seems like flashing ESPhome or an MQTT implementation onto this range of Tuya devices is within reach.

Before I start trying to break stuff, my question is whether anyone here has successfully jailbroken one of these particular LED strips (or any FEIT BK7231-based accessory) and if so, can you share what you learned?

Utimately, if this is feasible, it could be a much better future path for HA users currently on Tuya Cloud or Tuya Local, and a combination of these project could even make for a pretty slick HACS package that could jailbreak, flash and add jailbroken Tuya devices to HA.

2

Welcome!

If you search the terms you are asking about on this forum, you will find several helpful threads with peoples experiences on several type of Tuya devices. For specific device success, I find the best and most current information is found on the GitHub OpenBK7231 and Tuya Cloudcutter repositories. I have had success with OpenBK7231 and several LED light strips based on different MCU’s that OpenBK7231 supports. However, I do not have experience with the FEIT unit you are asking about. Good hunting!

3

Thanks. Yes, it seems people have had some success with Smart Dimmers, Outdoor Outlets and so forth - but I did not see any discussions about RGBCW bulbs or this LED strip outside of the Tuya Cloud and Local Tuya topics.

Since this morning, I successfully flashed a FEIT ORM60 bulb (same chip) I was willing to brick - and it was pretty straightforward. I had to play around with the PWM channels a bit to get the right colors, as the only other RGBCW bulbs I found profiles were not an exact match. I guess next I need to figure out how to share the profile back into that community.

Honestly it seems like this bulb is way happier speaking MQTT direct than it ever was on Tuya Cloud - it’s wicked fast and very well behaved with this firmware.

Now that I understand the process, I am going to try to flash one of my LED Strips!

4

Hey there @Wonko any chance you have a working esphome yaml for this device?? Here’s what I’m using and when I have my light state off, the led strip still shows bright green :frowning: and I can’t get a red color out of it either :frowning:

esphome:
  name: primary-windows
  friendly_name: Primary Windows

bk72xx:
  board: generic-bk7231n-qfn32-tuya

logger:

api:

ota:

wifi:
  ssid: !secret wifi_ssid
  password: !secret wifi_password
  use_address: 10.0.0.150

web_server:
  port: 80

captive_portal:

mdns:
  disabled: false

output:
  - platform: libretiny_pwm
    id: output_red
    pin: P9
  - platform: libretiny_pwm
    id: output_green
    pin: P8
  - platform: libretiny_pwm
    id: output_blue
    pin: P7
  - platform: libretiny_pwm
    id: output_cold
    pin: P6

light:
  - platform: rgbw
    id: light_rgbw
    name: Light
    color_interlock: true
    red: output_red
    green: output_green
    blue: output_blue
    white: output_cold
5

Any luck getting these working with ESPHome?