04 February, 2017

BroadLink SP3 SPcc Contros Mini WiFi Smart Home Socket

Ok, this guy has enough reviews and videos on the Net and pretty much all of them are positive.
And these are my few lines of wisdom on the subject.


Pros:
  • Good build quality, size, look, and feel.
  • Relatively easy to configure and upgrade the firmware with the Android app.
  • Two-way communication - you get the current state of the switch even after manual toggle.
  • Fast to connect to WiFi and with good range.
  • The Android app is good enough and has CloudBackup/Sync, so one can easily clone the setup on multiple devices.
Cons:
  • Lack of official support for desktop platforms, more importantly - Linux.
    I have found an alternative solution to this, read more below
  • The device will be alive as long as BroadLink's servers run as every proprietary protocol. 

The story is that, this kind of solutions are as good as what they are designed for. You can use your mobile to toggle the switch, setup timer functions, random mode etc. There are also some ways to apply "IFTTT-like logic" that I am not interested. If I can control it from the command line, then I know how to hook it to everything else - no third parties involved.

Initially, I could not find anything but recently, by chance, I noticed that Home Assistant (HA) can control this sockets. On the way to find out how, I found that there is a Python project  mjg59/python-broadlink that is trying to do this to certain extend and indeed it works. I was able to add the switches to HA local installation on my Raspberry Pi and then separately to control them from a Python script.

I have tried to share this information on the Banggood forum and the user reviews page, but they were never published... And this is pretty much the reason for this post.

If you know better/another way to communicate with these switches, please share it as a comment to the post. 

1 comment:

Ronald M. White said...

This smart socket is really great, very convenient and user-friendly, but your post is too rough, your introduction is not detailed