Contents
Little introduction Tuya
Tuya and Home Assistant have been working together well, but very limited. The ‘Powered by Tuya’-logo is showing up on more and more Smart Home products. This means that the Tuya platform is expanding and it means the product can be used with the Tuya and Smartlife app and also with SmartThings and IFTTT, as well as all the popular voice assistants: Apple Homekit, Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. Tuya is at the moment the biggest IOT company, with more than 5000 different brands and more then 100 000+ products and it is still growing! Tuya started with Wifi devices but today there are lots of BLE and ZigBee hubs that are working with Tuya.
We have discussed the Tuya platform and the Smart Life app before (tuya article), but we were a bit sceptic about the Tuya platform network. Reasons were the discontinued support of IFTTT, the announced limitations of the API access for developers and the lack of support to run your setup locally. However, there seems to be a large shift in direction that changes the smart home proposition and especially Tuya and your smart home system. Read along!
Tuya alternatives
Tuya is a big (the bigest!!) eco system, with different brands and products but also several protocols. Most of the Tuya products are working with Wifi 2.4 and they don’t use a gateway. Tuya platform/app currently doesn’t support Z-Wave products, it is compatible with BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy), Zigbee and NB-IoT (narrow band internet of things) protocols with help of several gateways.
Zigbee2mqtt remains a great local alternative. Zigbee has lots of devices. But Tuya has the largest range of products, other thinks are the standard home automation products like: security, lights, switches. No Tuya has almost every products category you can imagine. Pet feeder systems, coffemachines, curtain robots and much much more.
So our advices is to combine Tuya with Zigbee2MQTT and use Home assistant and you have the best system you can have: the best of Tuya in Home Assistant.
Review of a Tuya sweeping and vacuum robot cleaner
CleanWise D2-001 Robot Vacuum Cleaner, Sweeping and Mopping with Wifi 199
-
Design
-
Quality
-
Usability
-
Home-Automation compatibility
-
Price
Summary
The Tuya robot vacuum maps the floor as you can see in the Smart Life App. It makes a smart pattern and does efficient cleaning. However the vacuum has a small intake and no big main brush the suction power and the two side brushes works very well for a good cleaning. The integrated dustbin is easy to empty and to keep clean.
The downside of not having a big main brush is also very positive, therefore it is a good cleaner for pet hair.
But the best part of the Cleanwise d2 Sweeping and vacuum robot is the integrated WiFi functionality. This makes the Cleanwise a smart robot vacuum that can be controlled by Google Home, Alexa and Home Assistant.
Pros
- The robot vacuum has a sweeping and mopping function
- Tuya Smart compatible (and therefore integration with Home-Assistant)
- Height of 7,8 cm
- A smart mapping function
- Lots of accessories included
- A remote control
- Handles 2 cm obstacles
Cons
- Charging time of 300 minutes.
- A small direct suction intake on the underside.
- No big main brush
Link Tuya Devices to Home Assistant
Download and use the Tuya Smart or Tuya Smart Life apps to pair Tuya devices to the Home Assistant for controlling the devices from Tuya in Home Assistant. You can check the following links to download the apps.
- Tuya Smart App: iOS App | Android App
- Tuya Smart Life App: iOS App | Android App
The Tuya Home Assistant integration Wiki contains step-by-step instruction on how to install Tuya Home Assistant Integration.
The Tuya Robot sweeping vacuum in smartlife
When the product works in Smart life and you have already setup the Tuya v2 component, restart Home Assistant and you see the vacuum automatically in Home Assistant. If you have not installed the Tuya v2 component yet: follow this guide.
Basic features
However we can see the state, battery life and control the vacuum (start/stop) not all features in the smart life are available yet. Maps/follow walls and pause are not available at the moment.
Other Tuya Robot Vacuums that we have tested
How to get new devices working
Vote, so developers can prioritize and develop support for it.
https://github.com/tuya/tuya-home-assistant/discussions/86
When you are a developer (of you want to became one) you can visit:
Tuya Developer Platform
The future of Tuya and Home Assistant
We are exited about the future of Tuya and Home Assistant. We think it’s the best choice that Tuya could make to became more and more popular. We see that Home Assistant is growing also and became very professional the last years. Combination of those brilliant minds results in a very stable and easy to use Home Automation platform. Software + Hardware that work seamless together.
Now you have to use the integration from HACS but when it would became out of beta and official included as the default Tuya integration option both will grow hard! So using Tuya in Home Assistant is definitely a safe bet.
Report working devices
Every Tuya products would work on the Tuya app and the Smart Life app, but Home Assistant compatibility is not yet ready for all kind of product categories and products. So to be clear: currently it is still not possible to use every device of Tuya in Home Assistant. But we expect major improvements on this early.
For now, a Youtube home automation user Mark has made (with official Tuya support) a Github and a fancy page to check which product is compatible:
https://markwatttech.com/index.php/tuya-v2-supported-products/
https://github.com/MarkWattTech/Tuya-v2-Supported-Devices
Since we have a lot of confidence that can use the major part of the devices on Tuya in Home Assistant, we keep buying and testing Tuya products. We already have two interesting Tuya products: a smart pet feeder (not yet in the Tuya v2 integration) and the curtain motor that already is integrated.
We will publish a full review of the products and how to integrate them.
Tuya Beta Test Program
Tuya IoT Platform