Newer Miboxer WL5 and WL-Box1 with Tuya

Third party integrations
1

I have both of these, WL5 and WL-Box1, and after messing around with them for a week – don’t buy them. It is big pain to get the Tuya support working and when you do it only supports about half of the functions the lights are capable of doing.

Instead there is a far better and cheaper solution. Buy Milight FUT038 2.4Ghz controllers ($13 on Amazon). And then build this $10 wifi-milight bridge using an ESP8266. The Milight remote controls continue to work and there is a web page that lets you directly control the lights from your phone.

This bridge supports the full function of the light strips including white lights and grouping. It supports MQTT for Home Assistant integration. As a bonus the ESP8266 solution is fully open source and does not need to route your traffic via a server in China. For power I just plugged it into a USB port on my Rasp Pi.

A true hacker would interface the nRF24L01+ board directly to the PI, but I had this ESP8266 solution up and running in 30 minutes.

Throw your WL5 and WL-Box1 devices in the trash, you’ll be happier. Or maybe someone with make new firmware for them.

2 Likes
2

Can confirm, WL5 is a waste of money. Can’t use them without Tuya

3

Actually I have WL5 working with sidoh/esp8266_milight_hub, and HomeAssistant via MQTT and really glad I did not throw them away! The WL5 also has 15A max output compared to the 10A on my FUT038. Luckily I found my WL5s on ebay for about $15 so roughly the same as FUT038s on amazon. WL5 also has WiFi but i’m not sure how useful that will be without using the miboxer app / tuya and Chinese server. In any case the WL5 can work so don’t throw it away… Just pair it with this really cool esp8266 milight hub!

4

Hi All,

Does this work as a replacement for the ZigBee version of the MiBoxer Box (ZB-Box1)? Or just the WiFi version (WL-Box1)?

Thanks.