I just use Chemtronics, I tried some other stuff once and decided there’s no need to waste anymore time on other brands. For difficult jobs, add more flux.
It’s for heat dissipation.
Oh my goodness, I see now I typed Hot air “gun”. I meant the kind you use for soldering, ie the soldering station. Of course I already have a hot air gun, sommer a cheapie from Ryobi 
I would never dream of trying to use that for desoldering.
I have used those for desoldering a couple of times. Great if you are only interested in saving the component and don’t care about the PCB.
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Seems like a lot of hard work when one can simply use Local Tuya
I’ve tried the Tuya stuff for a bit, and I simply didn’t like having to use their dev platform, giving them an email address, registering my devices in order to get the values I needed to address things. That is of course less work than soldering stuff, I’ll give you that, but for the most part I avoid this at the buying stage: I buy stuff that I know will run Tasmota.
I did accidentally buy one switch that is Tuya only. It cost R200 or so. I will probably throw it away rather than waste time soldering chips or setting up LocalTuya for just one switch.
What alternatives are there to the Astute, a good quality smart breaker which most important is HA compatible out of the box?
I know there’s the Shelly Pro, but expensive.
What switch is this. Maybe I’ll take it from you
Don’t know if any of you noticed this post on another thread on MyBroadband: SA smart plugs that can be flashed with Tasmota
But that online shop, sells the CBI devices with Tasmota on already:
Smartpad Store - Tasmota Devices
Could save you a lot of time, they make some money, and you get it as local as you can to your home assistant without having to deal with Tuya at all.
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Afternoon @Smartpad, I see on your site you sell the standard Cbi and one that is already flashed with Tasmota.
To your knowledge, is there a workaround in Home assistant to use the CBI/Tuya device in local mode without using their cloud, or is it best to just buy the Tasmota version for use with HA?
I see its a little bit more expensive, I guess you guys change the chip and flash it inhouse?
There is an integration in the HACS store for Tuya local control GitHub - make-all/tuya-local: Local support for Tuya devices in Home Assistant.
If you don’t want to log onto the integration with your Tuya/Smartlife credentials you will need to figure out the local keys and api keys for your devices manually through the Tuya iot platform.
While we haven’t used it in a while our experience was that It’s generally stable but we had occasional instances with devices that needed rebooting an power monitoring data could be a little bit spotty… but take all that with a pinch of salt we haven’t used it in a year or more and much may have improved since then.
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I have used it in the past, seems like you have to re-authenticate ever few months. Don’t look at my home assistant a lot so wife will just complain that the geysers are cold. When I look i will see that I need to re-authenticate, took them off the HA and set timers on them through smart home app. No more cold water, but they are flying blind now and not even showing up on HA anymore. The way i feel currently is to rip them out and replace them with ones you sell that has Tasmota on them.
That sounds like a very good feeling you have.
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Same experience. I went through that process once. I decided I don’t like 1) the time it takes, and 2) being beholden to the Tuya dev environment forever to make these work. I’ll gladly spend more money to make it run Tasmota.
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TuyaCutter also works nicely to wirelessly convert Tuya devices to ESPHome
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Just some feedback, I’ve been running 2 CBI Astutes with Tasmota purchased from @SmartPadAdmin for over a month and I couldn’t be happier.
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@Smartpad I can probably go and read on the MyBB thread, but how do you flash the CBI Astutes with Tasmota? Changed the chips?
I have 3 (2x of the DB mounted ones and one plug), all running localtuya. It has been stable - I think I used the IOT platform option to get the keys and stuff and they seem to work just fine and are stable. The plug is quite far away from Wifi and it seemed to lose the credentials once, and to get it back on Wifi was quite the mission (mostly because I had to figure out again from scratch how to do it).
But the rest of my house is all Tasmota (I am not very fond of ESPHome) and would love to get the CBI’s in line…
Hi Eben,
For Tasmota you do need to replace the chip yes. you can use the ESP-12F module (ESP-12F ESP8266 Wi-Fi Wireless Module – SmartPad Store) We sell them preflashed in case you don’t want to hassle with flashing the chip.
You will need to add some resistors too, there are photos and detailed steps in the first post on this thread (CBI Astute Power Monitor / Switch -- Tasmotized! | MyBroadband Forum). The resistor bridged to GND does not have to be an SMD resistor, there is enough space to use a regular resistor but it need to be bent down “next to” the ESP chip so a dab of hot glue helps keep that in place if you use a non SMD type resistor.
The CBI Plugs, Isolators and controllers all have the same “Daughter Board” that has the wifi chip on it, so once the device is opened up the process and Tasmota template are all identical.
We have found that having a hot air station makes it far easier to get the old chip off without damaging the pads on the daughter board.
But feel free to reach out if you need any specific advice.
Even though your not a fan… ESPHome is supported on the Tuya chip which means you don’t have to do the chip replacement. You can use our Yaml as a starting point if you did decide to give that a try Device_Configs/cbi-asc.yaml at main · Smartpadza/Device_Configs · GitHub
There is an unusual sequence to getting this chip to boot into flashing mode, but these docs can help with that
https://docs.libretiny.eu/docs/platform/realtek-ambz/
https://docs.libretiny.eu/boards/wr3e/
You may also be able to get “openbeken” onto the device without replacing the chip GitHub - openshwprojects/OpenBK7231T_App: Open source firmware (Tasmota/Esphome replacement) for BK7231T, BK7231N, BL2028N, T34, XR809, W800/W801, W600/W601, BL602 and LN882H
We haven’t really used this firmware its just something we are aware of at this point, and might investigate more in the future.
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Hi @Smartpad,
Thanks for the detailed response!! OK, I knew about the openbeken firmware but I didn’t realise ESPHome was supported as is… I’ve also had concerns about opening up these devices and soldering and changing them and then putting them back into my DB board, but just flashing the firmware is definitely something I’d consider, even if it isn’t Tasmota.
So I take it the ones you sell as Tasmota are using the replacement daughterboard, while the Esphome ones use the original chip?
You’ve given me plenty to read on over the long-weekend - thanks!!
(Regarding my “dislike” for ESPHome - two reasons: I have one Wemo D3 running it and it still seems to disconnect more often than the rest. I have the add-on in Home Assistant and for some or other reason I can no longer modify the firmware from there - something is going wrong. Honestly haven’t looked into it enough. #2 - I just have mostly a Tasmota shop already.)
If your devices are not being picked up in the ESPHome Device builder addon, that might be an mDNS issue, (e.g. Unifi WiFi networks need a few settings turned on for this to work reliably)
The Tuya chips do have a bit of a quirk where mDNS does not work well so they also aren’t picked up by the Device Builder (they work perfectly fine in Home Assistant), to work around this you can set the ip address in the “use_address:” variable (WiFi Component — ESPHome) to tell the addon what ip to use for your devices.
We actually stock devices that come with the Tuya chip flashed to ESPHome, and one where we have done a Chip transplant for Tasmota and ESP Home devices, for those who are very new to ESPHome the transplanted devices are a more seamless experience. We do not change the daughterboard.
I used the ESP12S on my CBI devices I did myself, then the additional resistors are not needed at all, much easier. Only problem is, sometimes harder to get hands on the ESP12S chips.