Hey everyone, I wanted to share an exciting project I’ve been working on with the TechLife Pro smart bulbs I picked up from AliExpress. At first, I was a bit disappointed because they didn’t seem to be Tuya-based, which I had hoped for. But instead of giving up, I decided to dive into figuring out how these bulbs communicate.
After some research and with a little help from a friend, I discovered that the bulbs communicate via MQTT, connecting to their own server. I set up a tcpdump on my router to monitor the traffic and was able to capture some interesting data. Here’s a quick breakdown of what I found:
- The bulbs subscribe to a specific MQTT topic on their server.- I managed to redirect the DNS to point to my own MQTT server, allowing me to control the bulbs locally.- I can now send commands like
on,off, and various dimming levels using simple MQTT publish commands.
Here’s an example of how I send commands:
bash
Turn the bulb on
echo -en “\xfa\x24\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x24\x2b” | mosquitto_pub -t ‘dev_sub_2e:71:3c:6d:3f:bb’ -s
Turn the bulb off
echo -en “\xfa\x23\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x23\x2b” | mosquitto_pub -t ‘dev_sub_2e:71:3c:6d:3f:bb’ -s
The on/off commands work perfectly, but I’m still trying to crack the dimming functionality. I can hardcode a few states, but my goal is to achieve smooth dimming from 0% to 100%. I’ve been looking into the MQTT protocol documentation, but it doesn’t seem to match the protocol these bulbs are using. If anyone has any tips or insights, I’d be thrilled to hear them!
This project has been a great learning experience, and I’m excited to continue exploring how to fully integrate these bulbs into my smart home setup. It’s amazing how a little curiosity and persistence can lead to such cool DIY solutions!
Cheers,
[Your Name]