NEED HELP PLEASE- Third party TCP device with barely any documentation

Third party integrations
#1

So I’m shifting to a new house and have placed an order for switches for about 275 lights. The icons on these switches are customised so they do take time to arrive, at the time of the order I was told that they aren’t familiar with HA but they’ll give full support to make it work together.

Till now I haven’t had any luck, so basically I have 25 devices which control 11 lights each, and they communicate to the mobile phone via TCP/IP. And they way they work is that they send a string “ABCD==#%11001101001”, ‘ABCD==’ is sent for authentication, followed by ‘#%’ representing to change the state, and the numbers after that refers to the state of each light to be executed. So now a problem I have is that whenever I have to change the state of just 1 light, I’ll have to send the whole command with the current state of each light constant and only 1 value changed.

I am open to giving time to this project but as I am new to HA, I don’t know how to approach this problem, the TCP integration on HA only says that it supports binary sensors, I believe this could also be done using the ‘telnet’ integration, or even using node red.

For the more complicated part, storing the state of each light and then sending the string with one value changed, can it be done using node-red or python? I just want to mention that I am a beginner at this, there might be easier ways to do this than what’s in my mind. Please if someone can help me on how to proceed with this.

#2

What devices are these?

Do you know of any open source library for them? Particularly in python? Any documentation?

#3

So I’m from India and here the automation industry isn’t big, and only a few companies exist in this segment which are quiet small, therefore there is not much internet presence for these brands and literally no one working on these kind of projects here. Although I’m in touch with the company, I’m waiting for a response form them on what command should be sent to get the current state of the light and they will also share the authentication part of each of my devices with me. Although the information they gave me wasn’t quiet helpful for me, the only way is to try to implement what they have given till now, or maybe if someone can guide me on how to reverse engineer their app to track the TCP communication between the app and the device.

#4

Simple question, simple to answer.

#5

These are touch switches, each panel has 11 switches and it’s mounted on the wall. These devices have relays behind them to control the light.

#6

Is there any external way to get the state? If not you’ll have to keep track in the software.

#7

Can you provide the brand name of these switches?
Do you have any sort of documentation?

I think, there are plenty of information missing that would allow anyone here to give advice and suggestions about potential solutions…

#8

The company doesn’t have any documentation, but they are providing me with help. Till now the information I got was put above about how their authentication and changing the state of the light works. Just another thing, he told me to send these commands via an app named Hercules SETUP. The brand - Zemote

#9

Is there any external way to get the state? If not you’ll have to keep track in the software. And it will only ever be “optimistic”.