How to control Tuya Zigbee devices locally, thus not via the Tuya Cloud?

I have many Tuya Zigbee devices which are connected to my Tuya Zigbee Gateway.
How can I control these Zigbee devices locally, thus not via the Tuya Cloud?

My Tuya wifi devices are controlled through LocalTuya. But I cannot add my Tuya gateway (nor my Zigbee devices) to LocalTuya.
I get the error message “Connection to device succeeded but no datapoints found”, but the gateway is not added.

How can I control my Tuya Zigbee devices in HA without passing the Tuya Cloud?
How should I add my Tuya Zigbee gateway to LocalTuya, or should I use another add-on?
Should I buy another Zigbee gateway of reconfigure my Tuya gateway? I cannot work with a USB dongle.

Looking forward to your expertise and advise. Thanks.
I am a basic user of HA…

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Welcome!

I think you will have pretty good success moving the Tuya Zigbee devices over to a totally local zigbee network. There are two main ones to consider, Home Assistant’s build in ZHA and the external Zigbee2MQTT. Have a look at the database of zigbee devices at the link below and look up your devices to see the ‘experience’ people have had using them with the various local zigbee solutions. I would get a zigbee dongle and get a local zigbee system running with Home Assistant, then slowly, I repeat slowly move your devices over. Many folks make the mistake of doing a ‘rip and replace’ all in one cut over, and unfortunately often have a more difficult conversion.

I have both ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT setups, but even though it requires you to setup one more component, a MQTT server, I have found Zigbee2MQTT to be the better, more complete and robust of the two. Good hunting!

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Interesting. As ZHA and ZigbeeMQTT look to be band-independent, this looks very attractive. But can this connect with my current Tuya Zigbee gateway, or does it require another (or reprogrammed) gateway? I mean: the hardware module. In parallel, I will also take a deeper dive into your suggested options. Thanks.

No. You would need to purchase a zigbee usb stick for ZHA or zigbee2mqtt to use. Your “hub” would then be ZHA/z2m and all devices would need to be re-paired.

The devices would no longer be connected to the tuya hub and the tuya app would not see them.

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OK, that is clear. Thus ZHA and ZigbeeMQTT does not work with a Tuya/SmartLife gateway, and this gateway cannot be reprogrammed to be ZHA/ZigbeeMQTT compliant. I also understand that the Zigbee devices can be connected to only 1 gateway. So this means the only option if I want to go local, is to go shopping to replace my Tuya gateway. So I will have to postpone my little project.
Thanks for your help!

Also, there is a fork of localtuya that claims zigbee gateway support. No first hand experience with it other than knowing it exists.

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hmm, indeed, they seem to claim that tuya gateways could be supported by localtuya. Thanks for the tip!

chipping in do we still need HUB to get Tuya locally working? or even without having to use Tuya zigbees, can I just pair it locally with HA? using the zha?

You will need the hub because it working on different transmission than WiFi. And the hub is connecting your WiFi to the zigbee devices

Releases · xZetsubou/hass-localtuya (github.com)

Did you test this one so that’s why you recommend it? does it work with Zigbee gateway?

Hi guys, I follwed your conversation, but I still haven‘t understood wether I finally can control my tuya zigbee devices with my usb based zigbee dongle locally connected to my raspberry pi running
homeassistant (which works perfectly with other zigbee devs)
And if so , do I initially need an original tuya zigbee hub for setup of the devices in the tuya app as described in the local tuya HACS integration description ?

I‘ve done all the steps mentioned there , except the initial setup in the tuya app which is’n possible without a tuya zigbee hub, and failed possibly for that reason to get my devices autodiscovered.

All youtube videos I found are only about tuya wifi devices, maybe I missed the right one. Any advices appriciated.

Peter Krauspe

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Are you trying to add tuya zigbee devices to your zigbee dongle? You don’t need a Tuya hub for this. Just reset your zigbee device and add them to ZHA or Zigbee2mqtt.

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Wow sounds great, but I have to find out how to reset.
My tuya remote has only the 6 buttons and I pressed every button for different time spans, while having mqtt device adding started, but nothing happened.
Maybe there‘s a manual lying around on their web page.

Does that mean I don‘t need the local tuya integration at all, or is it doing something in the background ?

You don’t need to reset your zigbee devices, just put them in pairing mode, put your coordinator in paring mode and device will be connected to your ha.
You don’t need local tuya integration for zigbee devices.

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Thanks so much, I will try it again, but how ever I have to figure out how to put it in pairing mode, the little manual describes only pairing with the tuya app.

Its the same. Hold a button or put the needle in small hole in device and hold it for 3-5 seconds and led will start to flash. That is pairing mode. But to pair it you need to put coordinator into pairing mode just like you did with the hub.
Procedure is the same only you will connect your devices to your home assistant and not to cloud.

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thanks again, I got it !
After 15 secs it startet blinking and ha found it
Peter Krauspe