This is a great video, really don't want to take anything away from it at all. I love the very detailed approach. That said, I couldn't get it to work at first, and found some extra help on some web pages elsewhere. Two things that got me going: 1) I was getting a lot of disconnects on the UART, sometimes exactly when I plugged in the board. This was because it had an insufficient power supply. Having a steady, independant 3.3V power supply is almost mandatory for this procedure. Then connect the ground on that power supply to the one on the UART should solve disconnection problems. 2) Some UARTs just flat out don't play nice. The first one I tried was giving write errors, the second one wouldn't find the bus at all... and the third one I tried worked. Again, thanks! These switches are currently on sale near me for $30 (Canadian!) for three. Hoping to get this working in the whole house.

@MichaelKamprath

2 ай бұрын

Thanks for these tips! Admittedly my UART “just worked”. But you’re right, there is large variety of UARTs out there.

Great video! I will updated the firmware of my switches soon with the procedure that you described, so I will be able to control them with Home Assistant! Thanks for the effort to make this video and the clarity of your explanations!

@MichaelKamprath

7 ай бұрын

Glad you found it helpful. I can say these are great switches made batter by removing their cloud connections.

Thanks for sharing. This is 10/10. In home assistant, under available entities for this switch do you only see on/off or is there dimmer entity as well? If you combine the switch with smart colour bulbs, will the dimming button cause it flashing (due to buttons lowering voltage) or you can setup the dimming buttons as smart buttons and assign home assistant action

@MichaelKamprath

Ай бұрын

@@GikOnFlik if you use the configuration I make reference to in the video, there is a dimmer entity and an entity for LED brightness.

@GikOnFlik

Ай бұрын

@@MichaelKamprath Thank you for your reply. I got the switches yesterday and solder the pins. Will attempt to figure out the flashing and configuration today. Would you say information in this video is most accurate or maybe there is a post on forum with latest and more detailed information / walk through?

I have about 40 of these dimmers and 50 of the plug packs, as well as many of Feit's LED offerings of all varieties. I have other devices that are different manufactures, but have used Feit as much as possible due to great cost, and trying to keep as much in one brand as possible. I do not like the cloud, but have used it as such as I have not had the time to sit and poke around the firmware. I do have home assistant setup for my IP cameras. Besides the usual culprits of the cloud (tracking, etc...) the one big thing that drives me nuts is the constant having to power cycle (hard breaker shut off or plug removal) to reset communications. I found I get "device offline" errors periodically. No rhyme or reason. Sometimes its often, sometimes I can go months without the error. My biggest curiosity is how your operation and comms have been? I seen from another comment you have been using this setup now for a year? Hoping you say you had no offline error issues!

@MichaelKamprath

2 ай бұрын

In the 1+ years I have used these FEIT switches since I refreshed them, I have never had a reliability problem with them. I've only have reliability issues with ESPHome devices.

@r3tr0nic

2 ай бұрын

@@MichaelKamprath Awesome to hear! Appreciate the feedback and now certainly can't wait to make the change myself to my units :)

This is great! Flashed my switch and it works great. I'm new to MQTT. I can get on off to work fine but when I add dimmer to the config.yml it won't update the current state anymore. I got around it by making 2 different light sections. If you could share your MQTT config that would be super helpful. Thanks for creating this.

@MichaelKamprath

5 ай бұрын

I think you mean the config.yaml file for Home Assistant, am I right? My MQTT “config” is just what IP and port the MQTT server is running at (I am using Mosquito in a docker container). Remember, MQTT is just a transport for the messages between the switch and Home Assistant. Think of it like the “wires” between the switch and home assistant. Home Assistant is what you configure to act on the switch actions. I did provide an example Home Assistant configuration for this switch. Admittedly the switch configuration is in the MQTT section of the Home Assistant configuration, but that’s not the same thing as configuring MQTT. To have more than one switch, you don’t make multiple light sections. You just make multiple entries under light. Notice the - preceding the switch’s configuration under light. That is YAML’s list item deliminator. Look up the YAML list syntax if you are not familiar with it. For the second switch configuration, make sure you use a unique ID and command/status topics, and you configure the relevant switch accordingly.

Also, another question just came into mind - is it possible to use a RaspberryPi to (re)flash this device since it does have on-board 3.3v its UART pins.

@MichaelKamprath

4 ай бұрын

Sounds like you could in theory, you'd just need to use the right port device with the flash software.

Hi, can I use this tool to save a copy of the original bin file? I have one dimmer that I may have screwed up. I would like to use the original bin from one untouched dimmer and put it on the bad one. Is this possible? Thanks.

@MichaelKamprath

7 ай бұрын

I do not know if there is a way to dump the original EPROM image.

Can it be programmed for long press and function as a dimmer?

@MichaelKamprath

29 күн бұрын

@@GikOnFlik the switch is a dimmer. When you press it you will be controlling the internal dimmer hardware. However, you can connect HA to these signals too.

I’m not as concerned with the cloud service scenario.. however I’d like to use these on Apple Home… it doesn’t seem super straight forward, do you have any guides or recommendations on how I go about doing this?

@MichaelKamprath

7 ай бұрын

I have never looked into getting these switches connected to Apple’s cloud service. That would be antithetical to what I was trying to accomplish here.

@maogm12

5 ай бұрын

You could use Homebridge or HomeAssistant to expose these switches to your HomeKit

If you use an mqtt broker like mosquito won't HA autodetect the switch? I'm new to mqtt, but I thought HA will autodetect devices on the same network as the HA server.

@MichaelKamprath

8 ай бұрын

The device has to broadcast an announcement message at a path HA is looking at for HA to auto detect it. I believe OpenBK does support using that announce message. Clearly, I didn’t use it.

@7MBoosted

8 ай бұрын

@MichaelKamprath I am under the impression that tuya cloud cutter supports these dimmers and allows them to function in esphome and can flash these devices over the air. This is what drew me to your video as I currently have several FEIT devices from 2020/2021 that I am currently using with local tuya in my HA instance. I am happy, but would want them to be fully local hence my research.

@MichaelKamprath

8 ай бұрын

@@7MBoosted I will have to check that out.

Is there any way to read the original firmware off of these units to back them up? I have a bunch of these dimmer switches - bought them from Costco in multipacks and would love to migrate them to be local IoT devices and not rely on someone elses' cloud service. Thanks.

@MichaelKamprath

4 ай бұрын

Unfortunately, not that I know of. But I have been using these switches updated as I describe in the video for a little over a year now, and never once thought "I wish I could restore to original cloud based firmware".

@DarrenYung

4 ай бұрын

@@MichaelKamprath Well, in your video you used the -w parameter for write. I'm guessing there's a -r for reading? I guess I'll be taking apart my unused dimmer switch to find out! I'll let you know how it goes.

@MichaelKamprath

4 ай бұрын

@@DarrenYung yeah, but I don’t know how to put the MCU into a state where you can dump its flash memory.

@DarrenYung

4 ай бұрын

Well looks like I'll have to poke around some more. My board is slightly different than yours. I don't see tx1/rx1 labeled connection points, nor the write pad on my board. I think the chip on my board is labeled ht66f0185.

@DarrenYung

4 ай бұрын

Well further digging it looks like I have an older device. The Wi-Fi antenna looks like it's on a separate Device unlike yours which looks like it's made onto the board. Also looks like others use tuya to connect it to Home Assistant! Thanks for the quick response and sharing your video. When I get home I'll share my units model number.