So, for my birthday, one of my brothers in law bought me an Arlec Grid Connect lighting strip. We installed it on the tv cabinet, with the idea of creating some ambient lighting when we’re watching TV. It changes colour, from a pure white, to a much warmer yellow/ orange, and it can be controlled, either from an app or a remote control. So far, so good – but I’d been deliberately avoiding these kinds of appliances for a while, mostly because they don’t play at all with Apple HomeKit, which is the system that I’ve got running at home.
This gift, however, forced me to explore other ways that I might be able to incorporate non-HomeKit approved appliances throughout my home automation ecosystem. As is so often the case, most of the hard work has already been done by someone else, and all I needed to make sure I did was follow the instructions. I worked from this website, which explained what I needed to do pretty clearly.
The most interesting thing was that the light strip, which was sold as Arlec Grid Connect, is really the same thing as a Tuya light strip. Once I understood this, I was able to use an old Raspberry Pi 3, flash the Homebridge OS to it, and set that up as the hub within my home. This was accessible via HomeKit. The next steps, then, were adding the light strip to the Homebridge Hub. This was the only tricky part – it required me to set myself up with a Tuya developer licence, and then add the devices to the Tuya site. I also needed to install a Tuya plugin for the Homebridge Hub. Once I had done that, the devices started to appear normally in HomeKit.
I say normally, because the response has been a little bit problematic. I’m not entirely convinced that it’s a problem with Tuya or Homebridge, but more a problem with my buggy internet, but on a few occasions, the light strip (and the other accessories I have added since then) have dropped off the network. Generally speaking, restarting the Homebridge services seems to fix that, although I have had to delete the accessory and re-add it once, too.