Let’s discover how to bring together devices from the Tuya Smart Life ecosystem and Home Assistant to have the most complete smart home experience unified in a single interface.
Why combine Tuya Smart Life and Home Assistant?
Lidl, Carrefour, Action and many other companies offer smart devices from the Tuya ecosystem at attractive, unique and very interesting prices to personalise your smart home project.
To have the most complete experience, Home Assistant, because of its philosophy, is surely the best option since it will allow us to bring together most of these smart devices that use different technologies, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter by Thread or WIFI and much more in the same interface and create automations between these devices according to defined criteria.
And Tuya, being a giant ecosystem of smart devices, it may be interesting to adopt some of these devices and bring them together with Home Assistant.
The first reason is because sometimes we do not find products that are directly compatible with Home Assistant, so perhaps we have this option with the Tuya ecosystem, for example, with Tuya WIFI devices that you are interested in using and also want to recover and control in Home Assistant.
The second reason is because there are, in some cases, smart devices in the Tuya ecosystem that use Zigbee technology but are not yet directly compatible with Home Assistant and platforms such as Zigbee2MQTT.
In this case, you must additionally use a Tuya Zigbee gateway, which generally costs 15-20 euros, and from the Smart Life App, you can control these Tuya Zigbee devices and link them to Home Assistant.
There are also cases of Tuya Zigbee devices that were compatible with Zigbee2MQTT and therefore with Home Assistant and the manufacturers changed the firmware of new productions so they are no longer compatible.
And the only way would be to integrate them in Smart Life and retrieve them in Home Assistant while we have to wait for Zigbee2MQTT updates with new integrations.
It can also be because you don’t want to upgrade to the new version of Zigbee2MQTT for some reasons of stability or limitations of your hardware.
Or you simply invested in a Tuya smart device at the beginning and now you want to go to the next level with Home Assistant but not have this silo effect.
That is, have 2 applications to use your smart devices, one from Smart Life and the other from Home Assistant.
Whatever the reason, combining Tuya Smart Life and Home Assistant can be very useful and we will take a look at the simple steps to do so.
How to link Tuya devices in the Smart Life app
To use these devices from anywhere in the world, there is a free application with no monthly fees called Smart Life.
From this famous app, perhaps the world’s most popular in the smart home market, in addition to controlling your smart devices from the Tuya ecosystem, you will also be able to link them for the first time in this interface.
For this, the process is very simple, if it is a device that communicates with WIFI technology, you can launch the association mode from the Smart Life App by clicking on the “+” icon and “Add device” and insert the battery or connect your Tuya WIFI device to the power supply.
We are going to start by testing a pack with indoor temperature sensors, pool temperature sensor and display that shows this data and communicates via WIFI.
By default, any smart device is usually automatically put into pairing mode, but if this is not the case, simply read the device’s instructions and generally press a physical button for a few seconds to put this device into pairing mode.
Your device now appears in the Smart Life App.
You must add it to your App and indicate your WIFI network and password.
Now, you can access your device from anywhere in the world on your phone with the Smart Life App.
We followed the same steps to integrate a second device which is a WIFI irrigation controller from the Tuya ecosystem.
That’s it, you are now linked in the Smart Life App.
And now, we are going to integrate a WIFI push button and doorbell from the Tuya ecosystem.
We will integrate a WIFI camera from the Tuya ecosystem.
This time, we must go to “+” and “Add device”.
And we must specifically select the good device profile, i.e. a WIFI camera.
And scan the QR code in front of this camera if it is in partnership mode.
If we have heard a warning tone from the camera, we click on this option in the Smart Life App.
And that’s it, we have our camera linked.
Now, we are going to integrate devices with Zigbee technology.
Having our Zigbee hub previously linked to this Smart Life App, the process is similar.
We must go to “+” and “Add device”.
We start by linking a Zigbee keyboard from the Tuya ecosystem.
Now, we integrate a Zigbee plug from this Tuya ecosystem following the same steps.
And we repeat the process with a Zigbee motion sensor from this Tuya ecosystem.
Done, I have 7 smart devices linked to this Smart Life app, 4 using WIFI technology, 3 using Zigbee technology.
So now, let’s see how to use them in Home Assistant.
How to link Tuya Smart Life and Home Assistant
To link Tuya Smart Life and Home Assistant, let’s search for “Tuya Home Assistant” in Google.
And we access the official Home Assistant documentation. We have an “Add integration to my Home Assistant” button, which is a shortcut to install the Tuya integration in Home Assistant.
If you take a look, you can see that 26.9% of active installations integrate Tuya into Home Assistant, which is an indicator that it is very popular and also this popularity probably implies good community support. We hit this Tuya integration button.
Click on “Save”.
And click on “Open Link”.
We are in the Home Assistant interface and a popup asks us if we want to configure Tuya. We click “Ok”.
We click on “Yours”.
And now, we must enter the Smart Life user code.
To do this, we go to the Smart Life App on our phone, under “Me”.
Then click on “Settings” at the top right.
Go to “Account and security”.
We can see the “User code”.
Enter this code in Home Assistant and click on “Send”.
Now, we have a QR code to scan with the Smart Life App.
So we go back to this App, click on “+” and “Read QR code”.
We read the QR code that we have in the Home Assistant interface and click on “Send”.
Now all the smart devices that we have previously linked to our Smart Life App will appear.
We can place them in different areas of our house to have them organised in our Home Assistant interface and click on “Finish”.
That’s it, now we can control our smart devices and also scenes we have in Smart Life, in Home Assistant.
What functions can I control with Home Assistant
There are many issues. To begin with, the Zigbee plug of the Nous brand only has a few functions available, such as ON/OFF control.
And childproofing so that children can’t hit the physical button to turn it on and off.
But we do not have access to very interesting data such as consumption measurement functions that are integrated in this plug.
In the case of the Zigbee motion sensor, we have its motion and no motion detection information.
And the Zigbee keyboard cannot be used with Home Assistant with this method.
For these Zigbee devices, there is the highly recommended alternative of using a Zigbee dongle such as Smlight with your Home Assistant hub.
And the Zigbee2MQTT platform.
This way you will not depend on Tuya’s cloud and you will be able to take advantage of the different functions of each device, you will have this information on the Zigbee2MQTT website.
For Tuya’s WIFI devices, it is more complicated since we need this integration of Tuya with Home Assistant to work properly.
In the case of the Woox WIFI irrigation programmer, we can control it from Home Assistant by activating or deactivating irrigation.
Regarding the Woox smart camera, I have the image of this camera in Home Assistant.
And also different settings, being very interesting.
However, if you have Tuya smart cameras with ONVIF protocol, I recommend integrating it with Home Assistant in this way.
In the case of the WIFI doorbell, it is not possible to use it in Home Assistant.
And we can’t take advantage of the indoor temperature sensors and pool temperature sensor either.
But in some cases, you can take advantage of a plan B which would be to use the scenes retrieved from the Smart Life App in Home Assistant and which control Tuya devices and different criteria.
Since we have different limitations with this combination, I share with you different recommendations.
If you are starting your smart home project from scratch and want a serious and long-lasting project, I recommend as far as possible to buy smart devices that are ALREADY directly compatible with Home Assistant.
As devices that use Zigbee technology and that you have checked their compatibilities on the Zigbee2MQTT website.
Or WIFI or Z-Wave devices such as those from the Shelly brand, as all these devices can be controlled locally, without dependence on the cloud and an internet connection.
It is the most durable and reliable solution in my opinion and you have your data from your devices, inside your home with Home Assistant.
And in case you already have Tuya smart devices, it’s a lottery.
Simple profiles such as sockets or any ON/OFF device such as a water timer could be exploited, with their limitations in terms of additional functions.
If you have not yet purchased them, you can check beforehand if there is any integration available to avoid this silo effect.
In short, this combination, Tuya Smart Life and Home Assistant, is not a perfect combination given that there are still many devices that are not compatible, but Tuya Smart Life and Home Assistant, being 2 very popular ecosystems, we may have new integrations in the future.
Graduated with a Higher Technician’s Certificate in Home Automation, a Professional Bachelor’s degree in E-commerce and Digital Marketing, and a Master’s degree in SEO, I have been working since 2013 in a home automation e-commerce company called Domadoo, where I have the opportunity to test a large number of the popular Smart Home products on the market.