I did multiple hours of searching last night to find why shared devices in tuyasmart weren’t showing as devices/entities in ha. Nothing recent seemed to be relevant.
I tried the localtuya hacs integration and managed to find ips and tried to configure them but perhaps the local key was wrong (although I thought if it was wrong it wouldn’t add them) but a light just permanently said unavailable.
I gave up on that and uninstalled the integration and basically just gave up on the lights in general until I went to add the tuya skill to alexa and noticed that the shared lights showed there!!
My issue is that my Mum has her own alexa in her floor which she uses to voice control the lights. If I took ownership of the lights then I couldn’t link my app to her alexa because it was already linked to mine. If only I had linked the tuya skill to alexa in the first place I would have realised I could take ownership of the lights and share them to her and it would work in alexa AND they now show in tuya because they’re now on my account.
Now if only when dimming the lights it didn’t swap the bulb to colour and horrendously dim via ha. I have to go back into the tuya app and change the tab from colour to white to get the proper brightness back. (The branding of bulb is Brilliant Smart aussie stuff)
Using the dimming feature on tapo bulbs does not cause the same thing. I am hoping that when getting zigbee tuya bulbs that the same thing doesn’t happen in ha.
Bit of a ramble, if anyone finds this in future I hope it helps in your alexa minefield.
but as far as localtuya goes, getting the local key right is important. it will still find the device and offer to configure it without the right local key, but then it will fail and an entity won’t get created.
using the cloud account to do the config is the easiest way to get this right. it own’t use the cloud account afterwards… just for configuration.
this is also a good way to expose a single tuya device across multiple alexa’s. you don’t need to have it “owned” by only one alexa account.
if you need help getting localtuya to work, there are lots of us who have done that.
Rightio, If you have more than one alexa device in the same home but is owned by different people but need access to the same devices then the person that owns/runs HA should add the devices to their tuyasmart cloud account and then share those devices to the other alexa owners tuya account. That way the HA person can automate all the ha things with tuya and the other people can still do the “alexa, turn off the light”
Only one alexa account is attached to nabu casa so how would a different account receive the device or can you have multiple linked?
As for localtuya I did end up getting it running and works lovely!
one way of sharing it to multiple alexa’s is to use emulated_hue. this is limited in that it only supports lights, switches and a few other entities… but when you do that, home assistant advertises the devices locally on your home network. it’s not associated with any alexa account specifically. and any alexa on your home network can bind to it.