Teckin Smart LED Bulb

I found a pair of these on Amazon for around $30 CAD (after a $2 coupon saving). They look like fun to install. I figured that now that I know how to installed Tuya devices with the Homebridge, these would be great additions to the common areas of the house, should we need some colour added to our lives.

Amazon was extremely helpful and these bulbs came the next day. Amazon Prime is such a great service!

I proceeded to add these devices to the TuyaSmart app without any issues. Tested the lights using the app. I then logged into the Tuya developer site to ensure that the new devices were registered.

I provided the configuration into Homebridge using the following template from the homebridge-tuya-lan plugin page. Unfortunately, the provided sample template did not work, because the datapoint identifier, a terminology that represents a numerical id that uniquely identifies a specific device function, such as power on/off the device. My vague understanding is that the OEM, in this case Teckin, can pick and choose the datapoint identifier when creating their product, and map specific numerical values to the various functions of their devices. I gleaned this from Tuya’s developer documentation here.

Therefore, the provided sample of:

"dpPower": 1

was simply incorrect. The dpPower setting needs to have the correct numerical value that points to the power on/off functionality of the device. The default of 1 was not working, and I now have the challenge of finding the right value.

Through much research on Tuya’s site and Google, I found out that each device has a signature / schema. I found out that I can get the current status by executing the following command line (key and id has been replaced with fake ones):

% tuya-cli get --ip 192.168.168.8 --key 8ddeadbeef5456ed --id 55deadbeefdeadbeef40 -a --protocol-version 3.3
{
  devId: '55deadbeefdeadbeef40',
  dps: {
    '20': false,
    '21': 'white',
    '22': 1000,
    '23': 188,
    '24': '00bc03e803e8',
    '25': '',
    '26': 0
  }
}

I then guessed that the datapoint identifier started with 20 instead of 1. Also based on the value of 1000 for dps '22', I also deduced that I had to change the colorFunction from HEXHSB to HSB, because it was not using HEX to denote ranges. The last hint that I got was from this comment on a forum. Ultimately, consolidating all of the above knowledge, I arrived to the final configuration that looks like this:

{
    "name": "Smart Bulb 2",
    "type": "RGBTWLight",
    "manufacturer": "Teckin",
    "model": "SB50 Smart Bulb",
    "id": "55deadbeefdeadbeef40",
    "key": "8ddeadbeef5456ed",

    "dpPower": 20,
    "dpMode": 21,
    "dpBrightness": 22,
    "dpColorTemperature": 23,
    "dpColor": 24,
    "minWhiteColor": 140,
    "maxWhiteColor": 400,
    "colorFunction": "HSB",

    "minBrightness": 10,
    "scaleBrightness": 1000,
    "scaleWhiteColor": 1000
}

The lights finally worked with Homebridge and therefore also worked with HomeKit. I thought adding these couple of bulbs would be done in a few minutes, but it took a little more effort than I thought.

I couldn’t be happier that they now work with Siri!