I don’t get this. I mean you people buy devices from a company that is basically a data collection agency for the Chinese government. They deal in data, the cheap devices everybody seems to love are just tools to enable them getting at your data. That’s their business model and modus operandi. Just like Googles, Facebooks, Amazons, only with the added extra spicy twist of totalitarian control behind the curtains. And then you wonder why they try to lure you into creating accounts, registering, etc, all that under the guise of an ‘official’ integration. Well duh.
If you don’t like all that, then why the heck do you buy these devices ? It’s not like there are tons of local alternatives that don’t want your data and make you jump through all these hoops to get it.
Now this whole cuddling up situation between HA/NC and Tuya is a whole different story of course.
HeylmAlex, me personally ain’t that afraid of exposing my personal integrity. We are all being watched as long as we exist on the “grid” pretty much.
But it is a very good point indeed.
@anon63427907 thank you for the effort, I will switch to that. In HA while working on a different solution, cheers.
@aidbish ye, please give that some more thought. That is a totally different subject wich I will not discuss here. But I am clueless towards thoose who actually does what you are saying. Initial thought was OK I guess, but everything starts on a small scale. Give it some time to mature and we can discuss that matter somewhere else. And to be clear, I am merely expressing my disappointment as stated before. I think I have the right to do so. I am not looking for friends or supporters.
Okay. But then you have to accept the fact that with devices like these, you are the product. And you’ll have to deal with all the consequences that arise from this fact. Including, for example, deactivation of older and local APIs that do not fit into the data harvesting business model anymore. So what are you complaining about ? You chose to be the product and data generator for them.
Home Assistant is product agnostic. It interacts with 1800 different devices and services and all integrations have access to the same Home Assistant API. There is no preferential treatment.
To get these devices and services integrated we rely on APIs to interact. These APIs are provided by companies. In the case of Tuya, they once had made an undocumented API and contributed this to Home Assistant. The person responsible for this unofficial API left Tuya and the integration maintenance has been taken over by a Home Assistant community member. However the API starts being less and less reliable (throttling when called too often).
In the meanwhile Tuya has created a new documented official API (they call it Open IoT platform). It integrates more devices than the old API and it is push based, meaning updates are near instant.
They want Home Assistant to migrate to this new API and shut down the old API so they create a new integration for this. The old API is going to be shut down, the new one is the future, so we obviously want this in Home Assistant.
Our collaboration with Tuya extends to the fact that we gave pointers on how to structure their integration, reviewed their PRs and helped make sure the documentation is great. We do this with every contributed integration. We also invited them to the release party because this is the first time that a company of their scale invested engineering resources to create a Home Assistant integration. We have invited other contributors in the past too. There is no contract with Tuya.
If certain devices are not supported or don’t work as expected, that’s a bug introduced by Tuya and as always, we’ll work with the code owner and the community on addressing those.
People saying that us working with companies on integrating their products is a bad thing do not understand the very nature of what we try to achieve with Home Assistant. Home Assistant’s goal is to be the platform for your home that can include all devices and services. Your Home Assistant installation fetches your data from cloud platforms and local devices. It gets it all locally and goes from there to offer dashboards, automations etc.
@balloob, thankyou for taking the time for responding, but as i have pointed out in numerous posts, why has it taken HA so long to respond?
Tuya support has been notably absent as well.
Being as there was such a fundamental change to the Tuya integration especially as the old one was removed, why was it rushed into this month when things like covers were missing, it was also Chinese national holiday so tuya wouldn’t have respond anyway for the first day or so.
There is a PR for dimmers that now has to wait till next month that could have been included and not give people a bitter taste of the new integration
I understand time is of importance as the old one would be removed shortly, but would it not have been better to have waited at least 1 more month to resolve the issue of covers (has that been resolved yet and will be in next month?) as well as dimmers and have had people from HA/Tuya here/FB/reddit to assist, remember not all the HA community use discord or Github
I also think the communication could also have been better regarding the differences between the beta Tuya V2 and what would be included in the new Tuya integration as I believe most people presumed they were the same as supported everything the beta v2 did.
Firstly, thank you for taking the time to respond. It is appreciated and helps understanding some of the thought process behind the decision.
I would like to address this particular line however. This is a shift in language, although only slight, it is still a shift. In your own words you state;
Your system should run at home, not in the cloud.
“The cloud is a magical thing. Somewhere in the world there are computers collecting the data that your house generates, testing them against your automation rules and sending commands back when needed. The cloud will receive updates and improve itself over time so it is able to serve you better. Until it’s not. There are many reasons why your home might lose its connection to the cloud. The internet can stop working, an update might have gone wrong or the servers running the cloud crash. When this happens, your house should be able to keep functioning.”
and
“Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first.”
This new Tuya integration is nether putting local control or privacy first. It seems celebrating a cloud only solution written by a company that knowingly collects user data is a good thing? It’s confusing.
This is from a blog post 5 months. Why was this stance not taken with Tuya? Was there no other options available to you? Frank very politely asked the question on the live stream about the possibility of local control, seemingly already knowing the answer was, No.
There were products they knew were not going to be supported OOTB, like covers. That’s not a bug. Why rush it out when not everything that the current integration supported was available. Again, this was discussed on the live stream, so it was known this was the case.
I guess it’s a little confusing when the messaging from the top is mixed - We want a local only system and it will hurt us in the short term to make this happen, but then, here’s a cloud only solution with no plan at all in place to add local control.
It looks like you’re missing the point of every single of my pieces that you quoted.
Home Assistant still runs 100% local.
Home Assistant still does not have an API to add entities and relies 100% on integrations.
Tuya integration implements their own Open IoT Platform API.
Home Assistant stores all data locally and will collect this data from both local and cloud based devices and services. See also my blog post from 2016 on the different ways we get the data.
You ask why we didn’t take a stand and block the new Tuya integration because it pulls data from the cloud.
We have never blocked any integration based on the fact that the API is cloud based. If the user ends up owning/using hardware that only has a cloud API, we take it. Always have. It’s up to our users, and always have been, to decide how much they want to rely on the cloud. We advice to not rely on it, but you don’t always have a choice as many people do not own their home and for example can’t pick what kind of thermostat is installed.
If we had taken a stand and blocked a new integration while the old one stops working, users end up with no Tuya integration. That’s unacceptable.
I’m not missing the point, or misquoting at all. HA is about local control and having everything work locally, without internet. That’s what the masthead and vision states, or perhaps I misunderstand entirely.
I never suggested the new integration should be blocked, I asked what other options were available to you - i.e. to get it local instead of cloud, you have not addressed this.
Having no integration at all is bad, I agree, however as stated by the Tuya Dev on the live stream the shutdown of the old API is 6 months away, so why the rush to push this new one out with missing functionality and no plan for local control? Was there any discussion about waiting a few months and getting more functionality into the new API/Integration and starting the process of adding local control?
I understand that it’s a users own responsibility to choose their own products and that not all integrations can be 100% local, but this would have been the perfect opportunity to work with a large manufacturer to make a large variety of current and new to market products locally controllable.
Yes, we pushed back on the lack of local. And on the silly cloud dev account thing.
At the time that we cut the beta, Tuya’s plan was to shut down the old API in December. All platforms of the new integration were in except for covers. Tuya decided to hold covers back a release. We decided to go ahead because it would mean users had just 2 releases to upgrade.
In the stream they said 6 months That would have obviously influenced things, but that’s too late now.
Thanks for the extra info, it’s appreciated. It helps to understand how these things come about with the added information. Thanks for the taking the time
See, if there was more of this information from yourselves to the community in the forums etc on day 1 or even 2 then a lot of this flak could have been averted.
I do hope you are pushing them to maintain their integration otherwise if it goes stale it will be HA rep that’s tarnished
the matter is the actual new Tuya integration is missing a lot compare to the previous one.
I had to go back to 2021.09.X because I missed all power monitor from my smartplugs.
My automations are based on power monitor, so what should I have to do?
That’s unfortunate. When Tuya added the platforms we didn’t realize they would drop certain features. They will probably be added in the next few releases.
The old integration is also available as a custom component installable via HACS. That will continue to work until the API is shut down.
Of course, when the old API disappears, we may be ready for change and there may be new options.
However, no such warning came before the HA update. Moreover, you chose to completely ignore the fact that the original extension was also used to communicate with Smart Life devices. Perhaps like me they had 2 or 3 devices and that form of communication was perfectly sufficient.
I’m sorry I had to post this here because other voices were ignored. I am not questioning the efforts and contributions of your work. I am questioning the removal of the still functional support without notice and overwriting the configuration of the original plugin. There is no option now. This is simply a mistake. I now have a perfectly linked completely empty Tuya account with no devices. That’s the result of your work for me and a lot of other people. Have a nice day.
Is this some kind of joke you’re telling now?
Smart_Life devices are not showing up in the Tuya add-on now!
I can pair smart life apps in WebIOT, they go to show the devices, but they never appear in the new addon.
So smart life devices are definitely not working.[quote=“francisp, post:40, topic:345837, full:true”]
My Tuya device is visible in Smart Life, and with the new Tuya integration. So Smart Life devices definitely work.
[/quote]
Is this some kind of joke you’re telling now?
Smart_Life devices are not showing up in the Tuya add-on now!
I can pair smart life apps in WebIOT, they go to show the devices, but they never appear in the new addon.
@Filip_Svoboda
please consider the different experiences… in your case you are missing all, I can see the devices but I can’t do nothing, others have no problems at all…
That would have obviously influenced things, but that’s too late now.
