Tapo p110m not onboarding on homeassistant/matter as 'new' device

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1

Good people of homeassistant,

I just got a set of tapo p110m Smart sockets. They are matter 1.3 compliant (after a firmware update).

I can join them to tapo’s app then add to HA via matter as a device that already exists and a setup code. HA can control the device and has power/energy information.

But I cannot start with a fresh device and register into HA as a new device. It fails at “checking for connectivity at ”. By fails I mean hangs indefinitely. I have no feedback or reason…

Has anyone been through this before?

Help?

2

Hmm I may have answered my own question there… Works out well when one thinks about the problem when asking the question.

3

OK, some progress but not exactly success yet.

  • The sockets did need an upgrade to 1.3 to progress into the network aspect of the onboarding process when triggered by homeassistant (I suspect the interface is external to HA)

  • The process still fails at ‘adding device to homeassistant’, where the same works for google home - somewhat.

  • I can use them on HA by onboarding with tapo, then generating a setup code and joining to HA as an ‘existing’ device. Except when removing from tapo, the devices are reset…

4

Did you end up figuring out a way to connect the devices to HA without the Tapo app?

5

Hello, the honest answer is I don’t exactly remember. But I can confirm the devices are not on Google home or on tapo app, so either I added them on HA successfully or added them on an app, transferred them over then deleted.

They didn’t all pick up all sensors consistently, so I had to add templates to some. But they have all been working stably for months now.

6

This worked for me:
Update firmware in tapo app.
Remove from matter.
Restart matter.
Reset plug.
Add plug as new entity in matter.

It automatically remembered the assigned name and now has the energy entities.

1 Like
7

Nice!

My plugs have been working well since I installed them, I would buy more of these when I need them.

8

I’ve been going back and forth on if I want to use the Tapo API or use Matter for the integration with Home Assistant. Is Matter the objectively better option, or are there tradeoffs in more features being supported by the official API? Does it come down to polling vs push?

10

My personal view is that a standard like Matter is the way to make access and operation uniform, as opposed to using individual APIs for example. Which is more stable and feature rich is a different discussion.

In this particular case, I would use matter. It was the reason I got these plugs - to avoid having to use tapo’s api.