Smartap Shower Control: Getting started with reverse engineering a smart home device?

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Hi All,

I have just come across the this discussion on the dreaded Smart (not so smart now) Tap. I see people have been posting some great ideas into bringing the Smartap back to life as it was intended so just joining the discussion to help pool ideas.

I have just installed a brand new unit into bathroom that is currently under construction and as yet is not set up. I can see I’ll now face the issue of being unable to set it up to even work as a manual shower since the App has gone and the server is now offline. I would be grateful if anyone here has any ideas on how to pair a fresh unit with my home Wi-Fi in the absence of the App and no server?

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@brownadb Hi Adrian,

That’s awful timing! So the app won’t work now, that said I think we should be able to get you set up with the shower configured manually with a little extra work. Let us know when you’re ready to set it up.

Fingers crossed we can hope for better also!

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Hi mav1,

Thanks very much for the quick reply. The unit is all installed save the union on the shower outlet itself. I was about to test it then came across the problem. I just need to connect the union and put the shower head in a bucket to test it out.

Thanks again and any help to make it work at least manually is much appreciated!

Adrian

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For anyone in the EU here, we’ve just been given a full refund for our smartap equipment from Victoria Plum due to the smart service no longer functioning as the product no longer satisfies our consumer rights, we purchased in 2020.

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Thanks very much for letting us know Richard. Just been onto Victoria Plum and logged my case too!

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No problem. We sent them the email snippet above showing that they have stopped the service. I’m still going to try and get the system back up and running but it’s great to be compensated for the issue. I think anyone in the EU should be able to do the same, the manufacturers warranty is 5 years apparently.

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I just got a refund, no questions asked over chat - bought in Dec 2019

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Right, thanks to everyone for your refund advice - I’ve just got a full refund sorted through Victoria Plum. Now that’s sorted, time to try and get it fixed! :grinning:

I’ve done some more research today and so will look into getting some of the bits I need. I’ll also set up some means of enabling small donations to help the cause.

I absolutely cannot guarantee I’ll be successful but will give it a shot!

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I’m guessing now you have a spare £800 in your pocket you’ll be able to get all that kit :wink:

The offer is still there if you need some coffee money to help tho :slight_smile:

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Had an email chat with Victoria Plum just now. They agreed to provide a full refund but were suffering some company wide technical issues! Wonder if we have just crashed their system with all our requests for refunds :grinning:

If anyone else has a problem getting a refund via the chat, the agent advised emailing [email protected] (if that is where you bought it from) with the details, and the email team will sort out the request.

In the meantime, anyone got any ideas on how to pair my fresh unit with my home Wi-Fi and program the valve. It is all plumbed in ready to go but doesn’t do anything - thanks for any advice.

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Hi Adrian, nice work on the refund!

I don’t know for certain but I would probable start with previous suggestion from Steven of trying to get the old app on Android:

EDIT: As @mav1 says in the later post the above will not work, as the app controls the shower via the remote smartap shower. Sorry, dumbass moment from me there :man_facepalming: Thanks Mav!

Im in a similar position as mine is on my network but not configurable, I was never able to complete the setup, you may wind up in in the same predicament - now the servers are down I believe the evalve wont be able to connect to the Smartap Server, which I recall is one of the final steps of setup. I can still use mine but I have three outlets, with only one working (I cant change between them).

I have been able to change this previously by using postman to POST some JSON to the evalve’s IP but at one stage I had all three outlets on at once (not ideal) - for me it has always defaulted back to one outlet after a day or so…

Maybe some other users have some insight on the specifics of setup locally over IP, as @mav1 hinted to in their previous post.

I would recommend making a coffee and having a read through all the posts in this thread to get a bit more background. Best of luck!

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I know it might be a bit too late now as the server is down but the way I successfully got the evalve’s configured with my network was to turn off the WiFi security during the setup process, I think the system has an issue with WPA2. I know that the CC3200 microcontroller does provide a web server so it may be possible to get far enough with the setup progress to join a WiFi network

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@brownadb Yep to echo the above comments. A suggested approach is:

  1. install Postman on a desktop PC which has a wireless network device on it.
  2. In Postman create a new “HTTP Request”
  3. Select the type of request to “POST”
    4)In the request URL type in 192.168.1.1
    5)In the authorisation tab, select Basic Auth from the type drop-down, for the username use SmarTap , password: yeswecan.
  4. In the body tab, select the x-www-form-urlencoded use the following key/value pairs:

          __SL_P_USD: [ Your WIFI SSID]
          __SL_P_ENC: "WPA2"
          __SL_P_PSD: [NETWORK PASSWORD]
          __SL_P_OU1: 1 **see my note below**
          __SL_P_OU2: 2
          __SL_P_OU3: 4

          __SL_P_CON: "connect"

  1. Before you hit send, you need to connect your PC to your eValve wirelessly. Press and hold the power button on the main shower controller for 5 seconds. The controller buttons should glow yellow.

  2. Find eValve12345678 from the wifi network list on your PC. I’d give it a few seconds to make sure its connected and then you can go back into Postman and send the POST request.

  3. After that, you should be able to disconnect your PC and reconnect it on to your home wifi.

  4. [Optional] Your eValve should then appear on the router’s list of connected devices with its own IP address. e.g. 192.168.1.241. If you pop that into a web browser, the eValve should return some basic details about it, inc. the outlets.

Note: To be completely honest I haven’t gotten to the bottom of how the numbers used for the outlets work yet. But using those numbers above, potentially have the ability to get your SmarTap actually working! This assumes you have all three outlets in operation! Hopefully there maybe others who know more about the outlet numbers & types etc.

Also worth mentioning explicitly, the app won’t work at all and so the eValve connected to the wifi is relatively redundant at this point. That said, if someone here magics a fix for us all, then it might be useful to have that network connection. Also, as your eValve is potentially brand new there might be somethings that could be configured using the Postman method and so the eValve wifi connection would make that easier?

Hope this works for you!

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That’s brilliant thanks for your help guys will give that a go.

Only one outlet is connected with the others blanked off. I see some posts from earlier about configuring the outlets but looks like care is needed otherwise the unit could be bricked!

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In terms of bricking, you’ll be fine using the above commands.

Assuming you’re plumbed into outlet 1, I’d use:

__SL_P_OU1 : 1
__SL_P_OU2 : 0
__SL_P_OU3 : 0

That should avoid the risk of flooding by keeping the controller just able to the one outlet.

Hope it works for you.

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I have located the instructions from Texas instruments on how to read and write to the flash memory holding the application binary data, looks like it is done via UART

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.ti.com/lit/pdf/swra657&ved=2ahUKEwiKytSu77D9AhXFgVwKHea2DxUQFnoECBEQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2vm7_Y9-B0Q9z6BP6oK6qM

I believe the smaller chip near the arm chip is the flash memory chip

Screenshot_2023-02-25-15-39-24-58_965bbf4d18d205f782c6b8409c5773a4
Screenshot_2023-02-25-15-39-24-58_965bbf4d18d205f782c6b8409c5773a41080×2412 300 KB

It appears that smarTap are trading again, they have new job postings on LinkedIn

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Ah! Ok thanks @mav1 I am using outlet 1 the two are blanked off. At least I’ll be able to use it manually for now :grinning:

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Wish me luck, we’ve just asked for a refund via Victoria Plum, I didn’t realize the app had been taken off the app store until now!

Is anybody still successfully using the IFTTT integration or is that now defunct also?

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All defunct - nothing works

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Good evening all,

Just checking in with an update. I’ve been pushing on with efforts to access the eValve’s firmware. I bought some kit over the weekend and many hours later…

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… I’ve managed to extract some, if not all, of the firmware! Now there is a massive but with all this. The process of decompiling code from binary and assembly is pretty difficult and so still no promising I’ll be able to decipher it all or do anything useful with it! :slightly_smiling_face:

Lots more to come - I’ll keep you posted.

As mentioned before, if anyone is able to provide a small contribution towards the costs involved, I’d be really grateful. Here’s a link to where you can contribute: BuyMeACoffee - Mav

Thanks all!

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