Buyer beware - There's a mountain of products on the market that are advertised as "open source" which lures many of us in, but many of those products have poor quality hardware.
My heuristic for anything operating at mains voltages is "If I can find a product that looks just like this on Temu/Aliexpress, I'm not buying it". They're probably white label products sourced from the same factories and suffer from the same quality issues.
Relays found in smart plugs are often sketchy in my experience. About half of the ones I bought or set up for others make unsettling noises that made me worried about poor electrical connections and risk of fire. I only have two Shelly plugs but those don't suffer from these issues.
Tuya and their rebranded versions fall into that area too. Their power switches die early and they actually went from easily reprogrammable to hostile firmware. They have own cloud service you can't leave, only get an access code to - and the firmware prevents downgrades. Terrible company.
Tuya is just an IoT platform used by many cheap devices but I agree, it's low cost and cloud based which is a terrible combination. I wouldn't touch it.
> Just buy the ZigBee versions, they work beautifully with HA
802.15 does have it's place but some of us prefer 802.11 unless battery requirements dictate lower power PHYs. Zigbee is also depreciated; if possible, seek devices using Matter for their interop.
I've been trying to find high quality, open/local controllable LED lights that have beefy enough electronics and heat control to not die in in a couple of years. Unfortunately, quality of construction is even more poorly tested/documented than open source/local control.
And even more unfortunately, price itself is not a very reliable indicator. Low price is usually a sign of poor quality, but high price is not a sign of high quality, but rather more often just an attempt to take advantage of people who don't know better.
> but many of those products have poor quality hardware.
Absolutely. Cheap hardware means corners cut... regardless of how open the software is.
Shelly devices are quite open and well made but easily 2x the cost of other wifi relay devices. Belkin WeMo devices are similar price to shelly and about as well made but their software leaves literally everything to be desired.
Knowing what risk is acceptable and how to identify if a particular component is built to a spec that obviates that risk or not is probably going to _always_ be part of the DIY scene.
My heuristic for anything operating at mains voltages is "If I can find a product that looks just like this on Temu/Aliexpress, I'm not buying it". They're probably white label products sourced from the same factories and suffer from the same quality issues.
Relays found in smart plugs are often sketchy in my experience. About half of the ones I bought or set up for others make unsettling noises that made me worried about poor electrical connections and risk of fire. I only have two Shelly plugs but those don't suffer from these issues.