Swapping Etekcity RF outlets to Tuya Wi-Fi switch outlets

August 25, 2019

My Broadcom RM Pro Hub finally died this week. The hub was in service for about 2 or 3 years and was used exclusively to control my Etekcity Outlets. The Etekcity outlets were inexpensive RF based outlets that I had deployed around the house after watching one of Ben’s amazing videos. His video broke down how you could use the inexpensive RF outlet coupled with an RM Pro to really get some cheap Smart Home control over outlets and such. The result was a price point of about 6 bucks an outlet when at the time, Wi-Fi or ZWave Outlets were about 25 bucks each. Some even more. The range of the RF was also impressive which is why they stayed in service for so long at my home.

Now a days, Wi-Fi outlets are anywhere from 5 – 8 bucks a piece and offer Home Assistant two way communication and status. That was one of the things that was really missing from the RF solution. The 433 MHz signal was sent out but there was never an acknowledgment from the outlet if the signal was correctly received and processed. This forced me to build multiple catch all scripts that would repeatedly fire on and off signals to ensure a reliable experience.

With the RM Pro losing it’s magic smoke, this became a great catalyst for finally replacing the RF switches around the house over to Wi-Fi switches. If it ain’t broke no longer applied. I still had some Tuya based outlets from Nunet and Amysen so these would make perfect replacements for the RF outlets.

In the video we dig into the process of swapping out the outlets and then also touch on how I am using the Circle parental control device to wrangle in internet access on some of my IOT devices. The Circle prevents rogue devices from connecting to the internet unless I want and allow them to. This is another alternative to rolling out a separate VLAN for the IOT devices.

Of course, we also wrap up with some Home Assistant modifications to support the new switches. With RF stateless switches, we used a property called assumed_state that we no longer needed since we can now get definitive state status from the device itself. We comment out all those customizations since they are no longer necessary. The YAML is becoming a lot more streamlined.

Hopefully after watching the video, you will have some new ideas on how you can use some of these switches to provide inexpensive accent lighting around the house for maximum visual impact.

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