Tuya Local Control - Battery powered Devices

Third party integrations
1

Hello
I am quite new to HA ecosystem. I have around 25 devices for my new home, all of them Tuya devices, bought on Temu.
Yes, maybe it was not the best choice, but they were cheap and I was full of enthusiasm to buy them, since I moved into my new house. Rented house.

SO, I have 3 flood sensors, and 4 thermometer and humidity sensors. All of the, battery powered.
Although, I can moanage them through the official Tuya integration, i wnat to get rid of the cloud. I want to be fully offline.
For the others (smart curtain switches, relays, smart power sockets), I can integrate them to LocalTuya or TuyaLocal

I know this has been asked multiple times, but did anyone find a workaround for this?
I ahve all the details I could extract from Tuya Iot Platform (model, local keys, device id, properties, firmware details etc), but without succes.

I added the flood sensors in LocalTuya, but of course, they appear as unavailable.
chatGPT is not helping either

Thank you

2

Are all of these devices WiFi? Or Zigbee? Or Bluetooth? You’ve some options, but will require legwork.

If all devices are WiFi, you can look into flashing custom firmware on them via UART or TuyaCloudCutter. Firmware options are ESPHome/Libretiny, Tasmota, and OpenBeken.

If some devices are Zigbee, you can use ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT (z2m) and pair them directly to HA.

If some are Bluetooth, depending on the chip and firmware they use, you might be able to convert them to Zigbee. I know some thermometer sensors have this option.

3

All of them are Wifi devices.
And, for example I opened an curtain controller and it has BK7231N chip inside. (BK7231N-Beken Corporation)
I do not know how much work will involve (solder wires, find firmware, flash it, troubleshoot etc) since I am not into the electronical part too much.

4

Just to close this topic: After some months in HA ecosystem, and reading a lot I moved all my devices to ZigBee and Z2M. Also for privacy reasons.
I tried to flash one curtain controller with OpenBK, did not work. The options were also very limited, and the gain maybe not much

So, all of my old devices will be sold.
Thank you

5

The penny just dropped, and I worked out why we can’t use TuyaLocal or LocalTuya with battery powered devices !

They sleep, wake up, send the sensor reading then immediately go back to sleep … to conserve battery life, like many other devices.

This means that:

  1. they do not have wi-fi (or zigbee or bluetooth) active permanently, listening for requests
  2. most don’t need to listen for requests since they have no user-configurable options
  3. they are hard-coded to communicate to the tuya cloud server. If they have any user-configurable options, they will receive them from the tuya server

To change this will require loading different firmware, which will generally require opening the device and may involve a soldering iron.