Hubitat and Lidl Smart Home
Supermarket chain Lidl have recently been selling their own range of smart home tech and it’s really very good. Essentially they’re doing what many have done before, which is to offer rebranded Tuya devices, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Particularly when you’re hitting £7.99 for a smart plug, compared to £39 for a device with exactly the same features from Hive. That’s outstanding and I hope they make this gear a regular feature in their stores.
The smart plug is a bit oversized, but has a replaceable fuse and is nicely made. The extension with USB sockets is particularly good, with global and individual control over the three mains outlets. In the years since AlertMe I’ve landed on Hubitat as my current platform of choice (which I hope to write something about in the Near Future) and being that kind of person, I decided to write up some dedicated device drivers so these things can work as well as I would like them to.
The smart plug, also known as a TY-HG06337, was pretty straightforward and used all the usual Zigbee 3.0 commands and messages though it’s incredibly quiet, barely sending out one message every 10 minutes when not in use, so I’ll need to get proactive on presence detection part of my drivers in the future to make that element more reliable.
The TY-HG06338 extension had a couple of firmware bugs in its global control and local button messaging, but that’s been worked around in the driver. It reports the wrong endpoint (F2 instead of FF) at setup and then again (01 instead of FF) when operated, so watch out for that if you’re tinkering.
They’re still available as I write this, though my local store was down to unsold stock from other locations yesterday. Hopefully they’ll keep bringing them back when they can. The lamps all work with Philips Hue as well, but that’s for another time.