New Maintainer Needed

[tsightler]

As I have decided to rid myself of Tuya devices, I'm going to be stepping away from maintaining this project. I've enjoyed developing this project and have actively used it to control my Tuya devices for the last few years and I'm happy to see that this project is still widely used. Unfortunately it takes up too much time, mostly due to the sheer number and variation of Tuya devices and the fact that Tuya continues to make it more and more difficult for users to control those devices locally.

There's nothing inherently wrong with this, and they certainly have that right, it simply means that Tuya devices do not align with my personal goals for my home automation devices and thus I won't be purchasing any more of them and will actively work to remove the last few Tuya devices I have.

If you are interested in maintaining this project going forward, please feel free to post a note below. In the interim, I will try to at least keep this project working.

[chrissv]

Sorry to hear this. Hope someone steps up.
A question: What types of devices do you prefer in place ot the Tuya devices?

It's a shame Tuya wants to make access harder and harder. They should recognize that they can sell more of them if access is more widely available...

[tsightler]

Well, to be fair, it was mostly just a side effect of Tuya's decision to allow their app to locally control the devices when the Internet was down that made local control possible in the first place, but then it was considered a "security issue" when people could just figure out how to do it themselves. So making it harder really amount more to implementing tighter security. The vast majority of users just connect these thing to Smart Life or whatever app and use them with Google/Alexa, which requires the cloud anyway, so I can't really blame them for not attempting to support those of us attempting to hack the local protocol and control things locally as I'm sure that's a tiny fraction of their buyers. They have really focused on improving their cloud.

For me, I'm probably going to move away from wifi devices in general and move to Z-wave/Zigbee that I can control locally with my Home Assistant. I'm not saying I'll never have a Tuya device again, but if I do I will just live with controlling it via the cloud API instead of locally.

If others end up putting in the effort to make better libraries for Tuya (TinyTuya looks interesting, but is Python so not really suitable for tuya-mqtt) it might be possible to continue this project, but I don't have time to maintain this project and deal with all of the underlying Tuya protocol issues as well. I look at it just like the ring-mqtt project which I maintain as well, in ring-mqtt I use ring-client-api, so I don't deal with all of the changes to the underlying stuff as that's abstracted from me. The difference is, ring-client-api is actively maintained, while TuyAPI is mostly the same as it's been for years now, sure a few minor things fixed by PRs from others (including myself) but mostly it's just static. Since I don't have time to maintain TuyAPI, from my perspective I don't see a path forward for this project as it will have more and more devices that don't work or have various issues and most of those issues will be with the client library, not the project itself.

[WiredLife]

Which lights (rgbcw) are you using now?
Is there anything cheap zwave/zigbee in the pricerange of tuya?

[tsightler]

Honestly, I still have a couple of Tuya rgbcw lights, but I just control them via localtuya HA addon, which works great. The other wifi Tuya bulbs I managed to flash with Tasmota so I can control them locally via MQTT.

I also purchased a few of these:

https://www.amazon.com/Changing-Dimmabel-Multicolor-Assistant-Required/dp/B08QC9P49G/ref=sr_1_6

As far as I can tell these are the exact same Tuya bulbs but use zigbee instead of wifi (Tuya also makes zigbee devices and even sells a zigbee hub).