One Remote to Rule Them All

One of my recent purchases was this Tuya univeral remote from AliExpress.

The promise is that you are able to control a variety of appliances (TV, Set top box, Air conditioning etc) from a mobile phone. It learns and transmits the Infrared codes for these devices.

It works pretty well, out of the box the hardware is coupled to the Smart Life - Smart Living. Requiring you to install an app and be locked into the vendor’s cloud solution.

Taking a look inside the device, it has 6 IR LEDs which give 360° coverage, placed centrally in a room you can expect good coverage of most devices. There is also a IR LED for receiving signals.

Powering the board is a BK7231N chip which seems to be an ESP replacement which support Wi-Fi and bluetooth connectivity.

Underneath the board are various test pads. Annoyingly the silk screen appears to have been printed incorrectly as the characters have been mirrored.

In an effort to decouple from the vendor’s cloud, a bit more searching and I found OpenBK - a Tasmota like custom firmware.

Using an FTDI USB->Serial cable and the BK7231 GUI Flash Tool I was able to overwrite the stock firmware

With the custom firmware installed it can now join an MQTT message bus and in future be integrated into Home assistant