Home Assistant and Tuya - which path did I choose?

Tuya licenses an IoT platform that is VERY popular with the OEMs of various IoT products. If you buy something from a big box IoT store, ALDI, etc., chances are in a lot of cases, it's going to be powered by Tuya technology.

Initially they used chips from Espressif, and these were easily reflashed to other firmwares, but more recently they have moved to using different SoCs which either require physical connection to re-flash OR cannot be reflashed and need to be replaced if you wish to use different firmware.

Tuya does provide a cloud integration for Home Assistant, "Tuya", but it is a cloud integration, which means that to control your local devices, you need to reach out to the Tuya cloud and back to control things.

I don't know about you, but the idea of needing to reach out to the cloud and back to be able to turn something on and off seems counter intuitive. Additionally, the official Tuya cloud integration only supports some devices. So once you connect it to your Tuya account, you might find some devices are seen, but HA cannot provide any control of the device. Work is being undertaken over time for the cloud integration to have broader device support, but it's slow going.

For local control, that means one's options often involve one of:

• Installing a different firmware
• Installing a different SoC
• Using a different Tuya HA integration through HACS

Now, confusingly enough, there are two HACS integrations for Home Assistant to do local Tuya control:

• Local Tuya - https://github.com/rospogrigio/localtuya - Available in default HACS
• Tuya Local - https://github.com/make-all/tuya-local - Needs additional repo added

Yes, their names make it even harder to differentiate them.

I initially tried the Tuya cloud integration, found that it didn't support a lot of my devices, and then moved on to Local Tuya.

Local Tuya has more hardware support out of the box than the cloud Tuya integration, and is available in the default HACS repository, but only supports a handful of Tuya protocol versions, and did not support my "galaxy" lamps", or my newly installed hot water heat pump.

 

Tuya Local appears to support more versions of the Tuya protocol, and have a wider included list of supported hardware, but it's only available from a separate repository.

With Tuya Local integration, all of my devices (save two, Brilliant Ceiling Fan controllers, which appear to be very temperamental even with the Tuya apps themselves, model 99333 - they keep dropping off the wifi and do not respond to local network requests).

I will say I have made significant use of Claude Code in my research and integrations. Open source is fantastic, but the documentation often isn't the focus of the work, so tools like AI can help to better customise what documentation is available for one's specific circumstances, and suggest changes to one's configuration or code.