These bulbs, along with the Merkury smart switches are both on sale for Black Friday and Cyber Monday for $9.99. Maybe if me spread the word it will help attract attention. The switches are normally $19.99 so that’s the value. I see people on reddit homeassistant say the Tuya app works on a cell phone to add Merkury devices to HA.
I got the bulb to work with HA using Tuya. The bulb is very dim on color though, much dimmer than my Lightify bulbs. On white it is fine.
I should have read the tuya.py file as it doesn’t support the ‘flash’ effect, which is what i was looking for.
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Mine work great, the white is definitely a similar brightness to my lifx but the color is dimmer but still ok
Do these work on your local network, or of of a cloud service? The docs in the component section are a little vague
I’m not sure but I’d say both if I had to guess. If you want me to check something specific to be sure give me instructions and I’ll give it a shoot. I’m not a programmer, but I good with computers, am learning.
Ok, So I have about 6 Merkury Bulbs (some multi-color, some white) that were purchased off the shelf at a Walmart for ~$13. These are fully functional with homeassistant, however there is a bit of configuration beforehand.
You will need the ‘Tuya’ app, yes the bulbs are ‘Merkury’ and use the ‘Geenie’ app, but you must set up with the ‘Tuya’ app. If the bulbs were already paired to the Geenie app, they need to be removed from the app and factory reset (there is an option when removing from the app).
In the Tuya app, you will need to create a new account. This account MUST be different from what was used for Geenie. EX: If you used your mobile number for Geenie, use your email for Tuya; vice versa if used email for Geenie use mobile for Tuya, or just use a new email address altogether. Regardless, it HAS to be different.
These bulbs are ‘hub-less’ so the state is stored on the Tuya servers, both Geenie and Tuya store account info in the same database more or less. This is why the accounts need to be separate and the bulbs removed completely from the Geenie app (this will remove the bulb link in their database to your ID).
CONFIGURATION.YAML
tuya:
username: TUYA USER ID (this is email or phone number that you registered, I used email)
password: TUYA PASSWORD (the password that you created when you registered with TUYA)
country_code: (USA RESIDENTS use 1)
EX: (email and password have been changed, but this is what you config should look like)
tuya:
username: [email protected]
password: Pass123Word!#$
country_code: 1
Save the file, then restart the homeassistant server. On reboot verify that there are no errors in the logs. If everything is successful, homeassistant should pull you bulbs into your dashboard!
If you have any issues, please let me know. It took me quite a bit of trial and error to get to this point, but this has worked for me and several colleagues without fail from here on out.
These Merkury products are awesome and the price point is spot on, I hope that you all find this guide useful.
- Mike G.
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Hi Mike,
Bought a Merkury light bulb this evening and am trying to figure out how to get Tuya to acknowledge my credentials made from the Tuya smart app. Is this information still the current way to get Tuya connected device to be displayed in HA?
Is there a certain spot in the configuration.yaml i should put the Tuya information in, or make a completely different file of that same name?
Thank you!
Last night I successfully flashed Tasmota onto 2 of these White bulbs with Tuya Convert
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@rlongfield-
This is very interesting.
What programmer hardware did you use?
Was it hard to get the bulbs apart to get to the boards?
With the new firmware are they accessible locally without a dubious cloud connection?
I didn’t have to take the bulb apart or use a programmer.
I used Tuya-Convert (https://github.com/ct-Open-Source/tuya-convert). It works OTA.
When you are done the bulbs are running Tasmota and are completely free of the cloud!
Is there any special method? I’ve tried following the steps and I keep getting connection refused. I’m running it through a pi so all the stuff is on that and I’m using my phone as the intermediate device but its not backing up or anything. ideas?
I wrote up the process I used. I can get it to you tomorrow as it’s at work.
There was 2 things I needed to do that wasn’t in the steps.
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Thanks, i’d like to get it working just to play around with it…
Totally understand. My bulbs sat in their boxes as I didn’t want them connecting to the cloud. I had planned on opening them and flashing them along the lines of the sonoff.
So I managed to get it flashed. For some reason I had to do the ‘reset’ process in the middle of the firmware dump. Now I’m just trying to figure out which module type to use.
@forsquirel when you run the ./start_flash.sh command do you see the ‘vtrust’ wireless network and when you try to connect to it nothing happens?
I found I had to run
killall wpa_supplicant
Now I was on Kali linux when I did this. As soon as I used the command above I was able to connect to the vtrust network properly.
Hope this helps
I ran it from a fresh pi install with just the tuya files. Everything worked, I could just not get it the light to connect to the network. Everything is flashed now and set up, but I’m not sure which module is the correct one for this light.
edit: I should mention I have the Merkury 75w white+color bulb
ah check the Wiki on the Tuya convert git-hub page.
On the compatible devices under lights you;ll find a few Merkury lights.
I put in the entry for the white light. I used the generic module and set GPIO5 to PWM1. But double check that it’s the same model.
Once set you’ll be able to use the web interface on the bulb to turn on, off, and have brightness control.
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Thanks! If I figure anything else out I’ll drop it in this thread
Hi,
Would you by chance have a write up on this? I’m going to have to set me up a linux machine. I’ve been very involved with computers for years and years it’s just linux is not my strong point at all.
Thanks,
Steve