Disclaimer: most of this is already “out there” in the forums, this is a summary and my experience.
You may or may not be aware that Tuya has been replacing the ubiqitous ESP chips from their devices for a chip which is pin-compatible but does NOT run Tasmota, ESPurna or ESPHome. Quite recently, a project named Openbeken managed to exploit new generation Tuya hardware with these chips which allows them to run custom firmware, very similar to Tasmota, which of course means these can be disconnected from the cloud and run completely local.
I bought a pack of 4 “LVWIT” branded bulbs from Amazon UK for £34 and flashed them, over the air, using the excellent tuya-cloudcutter, used a stock firmware binary from the Openbeken project and, with a little trial and error, managed to work out the PWM assignment for the bulb meaning it is 100% working on the custom firmware.
There is a growing database of compatible devices and, pretty much the same as Tasmota, provided the chip is compatible, Openbeken will work on it.
This opens up a massive range of devices which have switched to the Beken chips from espressif ones - there are a couple of other chip manufacturers supported too.
There is also another project which is aiming to provide support to ESPHome for Beken-based devices called Libre-Tuya - there is a fork of ESPHome which already provides binaries for these chips and a pull request to have this merged into the main ESPHome - if/when that happens, it will provide a single platform on which espressive, Beken and other third party chips can all be flashed with firmware and thus integrate into Home Assistant.
The Openbeken firmware has MQTT baked in and native discovery for Home Assistant so once the device is configured, the data is pushed to Home Assistant and shows up automatically allowing full, local control over any devices.
Here’s a link to a post charting my progress with these bulbs and the required configuration. I’ve submitted a PR for the device so soon enough it will be available directly from the Openbeken webapp directly from the bulb.
