First, some background -
I work in technical support for a Chinese manufacturer making (among other things) home monitoring devices. I’m our resident open source enthusiast in the North American market, not that any of my bosses know or care. My background is not in comp sci or networking, so the only applicable knowledge I have is from my meager experience with my own home lab.
We have a product (I’ll refer to it here as the Brain) that communicates wirelessly with our other devices, takes the data from them, sends the data encrypted to our servers, and is available to our customers through our web portal or phone app.
We got a support ticket recently from a customer (and software developer) asking technical questions about the communication protocol from the Brain to our servers. This customer was trying to work on Home Assistant integration for our product stack, but was hitting some roadblock that I can’t even pretend to understand. To my understanding, the integration would allow a Home Assistant server to locally gather the same information sent to our servers.
After escalating the issue to our HQ team and some back and forth there, eventually the answer was that the data transfer is encrypted and we aren’t going to share any details about it. We don’t officially support this type of integration and have no plans to. Our tech contact at HQ offered to sell API access to this customer, but obviously that isn’t what he was hoping to hear.
The customer replied that this answer didn’t surprise him, but that he would be happy to develop the Home Assistant integration if we made the necessary information available to him.
So, here’s my questions - How can I advocate from within my company to open up this aspect of our platform for open source devs to integrate our products into Home Assistant and other open source IOT platforms? Has anyone successfully made a case for this kind of thing within their own companies? What talking points can I use that my higher ups will actually listen to and understand?
I’m considering reaching out to the customer privately to seek a better understanding of what he needs from our platform. Does that seem ill-advised to anyone here?
TLDR - My employer manufactures IOT devices and locks down the platform with proprietary networking protocols. A customer and developer is seeking to write an integration for our products to work locally with Home Assistant. My higher ups said that isn’t possible and I want to convince them to make the changes necessary for it to work.
Are you from Tuya? They seem hellbent on locking their stuff down to the cloud.
Perhaps point out to your management that IOT is an enthusiast driven market. If you appease the enthusiasts, they will recommend your products to their less technically inclined friends.
Enthusiasts want both: a good initial software ecosystem, and the option to break out of that if required. If your company can offer that, even if it involves voiding the warrenty, we’ll buy and recommend their stuff.
In the case of Tuya, their stuff was historically super easy to open, solder some jumpers and flash (or exploit the OTA to flash). I bought loads of their power boards and lights. In some ways I was an ideal consumer, I bought their stuff, voided the warrenty immediately (so no support calls), and never used their cloud, so didn’t waste their resources. Now they are making it near impossible, and I won’t touch their stuff.
All that said, good luck, your gonna need it.
There’s Tuya Cloudcutter now that can hack a lot of current devices wirelessly. It’s a good way to get cheap “open firmware” IoT devices.
Have they updated it for new stuff? Last time I tried it cloudcutter was patched in new stuff :(
I’m not sure they have, but there’s still so much stock of old firmware out there, there are even companies who straight up haven’t pushed an update for their devices yet. Maybe I’m having more luck because I’m Aussie? But even CostCo had a home-brand of bulbs they haven’t updated yet.
I am also Aussie, but I’ve been buying from Aliexpress of late. Maybe should try some Mirabella bulbs again, last time I bought them it was after the first OTA exploit was fixed, but before cloudcutter. Had to slice open the bulbs and flash via serial.
Are you just getting stuff from Costco?
Nah got a bunch of bunnings stuff as well. The Arlec Grid Connect stuff works well, I got a smart plug with a USB that actually has a separate relay for the 5V.