Yep! Another teardown post! This one was also a cheap “because i’m curious” post.

What

It’s a ‘decora’ style wall switch with WiFI and an RGB color changing paddle.

The product listing was very non specific:

EU US WiFi Smart Wall Switch Push Button Timer Relay Switch Voice Remote Control RGB LED Night Light Lamp TUYA Alexa Google Home

I saw TuYa in the item description and hoped that it would be based on an ESP8266 module or at least use a pin-compatible module. After all, there are a few such devices on the Wall Switches and Dimmers section of the tasmota templates repository.

Yet another teardown post!

Curiosity got the better of me while putting together a BOM for a project and I decided to add one of the new Shelly devices to my order to bump the total over the threshold for a nice discount.

I have not seen a ton of discussion about what’s inside of a any of the new Shelly Pro devices. These ’next generation’ devices appear to all use a common and more uniform API which, apparently, is too demanding of the ESP8266 based hardware so it won’t be backported.

I am trying something new out with this post; some mix of hardware teardown and a brief product review.

Why

I was looking for a way to actuate some heavy blackout curtains.

There have been several DIY projects out there that manipulate curtains but they all appear to be relatively involved as they are often designed for a very specific type of curtain; servos that fit on the ’tilt rod’ or motors that can manipulate the pull chain… etc.

Surfacing the right information at the right time in the right place is a difficult but essential task for any credible automation system.

I have been experimenting with the concept of a Home Assistant powered KDS for a few years now and have found that the refrigerator happens to be an especially good place to surface some information and device controls.

If you somehow missed it, one of the certificates used by Lets Encrypt chain of trust expired this week. As expected, things broke…. including my private, filtered DNS over TLS server - SkyHole. Below is a condensed form of my notes to create the exact document that I wish I had while trying to triage broken DNS on my phone.

TL;DR: Implement solution 3 from this post.