Are Treatlife devices a good option for low cost and reliable smart home gear?
I am looking for single pole and 3-way dimmers and switches and ceiling fan controls.
Are they difficult to flash with alternative firmware?
Tasmota or OpenBeken?
Frustrating that Kasa is locking down their devices to require a cloud account and devices authentication.
I have some aging Insteon gear (too pricy & risky to invest more) and some Kasa devices (pre-authentication). Would love to stick with Kasa but having to authenticate is a no starter for me.
I’ve only used the treatlife bulbs and they’re still working
Tasmota is definitely not flashable since they’re using beken chip. So you could install openbeken or esphome for it
Assuming the firmware’s not patched yet you can use cloudcutter to flash the firmware via ota which should take around 3-4 minutes. Otherwise it’s back to serial method
I have 10 of them, ranging from 2-5 years old now, making them the majority switch brand in my home. I really liked their touch dimmers and just got the switches to match. Only one has failed, due to a power surge (so now I have a whole-home SPD). All are flashed with Tasmota — several from back when TuyaConvert worked, but some I soldered on an esp12f which was a bit of a pain, so if I got more today I’d probably use libreTiny.
It appears the switches ( as you stated ) require the beken flash.
What is troubling is that I have read that they have started soldering the boards together, meaning they need to be de-soldered and separated just to have access to the pin locations so that the device can be flashed.
Seems like the newer switches are using different chip (beken) and appears further steps have been taken to make it difficult to flash the devices (soldered boards together)
Clock is ticking on the Black Friday sales and need to figure out what I am doing asap.