Blitzwolf LT11 with ESPHome

I’ve had the Blitzwolf LT11 LED strips at home for a while and they hang in my shelving units, but the problem with these LED strips is that they have standard firmware from Tuya. Which means that communication goes through the cloud and I really wanted to get rid of that and control it local, but I didn’t know how. Until today!

What do you need

Tuya-convert
Raspberry Pi (or anything else that runs on linux and can set up its own WiFi Access Point)
Mobile phone
Home Assitant that runs the ESPHome add-on

Create an ESPHome node

To keep it easy, I already have a YAML configuration ready for you on my Github repository. You can place it directly in your /esphome folder or first go through the wizard and then adjust the YAML config of your newly created node in the UI.

Install Tuya-convert

git clone https://github.com/ct-Open-Source/tuya-convert
cd tuya-convert
./install_prereq.sh

Installation should end with the following lines:

Successfully built paho-mqtt pyaes tornado
Installing collected packages: paho-mqtt, pyaes, tornado
Successfully installed paho-mqtt-1.4.0 pyaes-1.6.1 tornado-6.0.2
Ready to start upgrade

Now we have tuya-convert ready and we can go for the firmware preparation.

Preperation of the firmware

You should already have a node in ESPHome ready, with the YAML code from this page loaded. Before flashing, we must first compile and download an image file (.bin) from ESPHome.

You can do this by clicking on the 3 dots (right side) of your node in ESPHome and choosing to compile, when this is done click on download binary at the bottom right. The next step is to put the created image file on the raspberry pi (with for example Filezilla) and put it in the files folder which can be found inside Tuya-convert.

Flash the firmware

Yes we can finally start flashing!

We are going to start Tuya-convert first, we do this by running ./start_flash.sh on the raspberry pi. After this you will be asked a question that you can answer with yes and then press enter.

When all necessary services have been started, a WiFi network is created called vtrush-flash. Grab your phone and connect to this network, if you are asked for a password it’s: “flashmeifyoucan” (😎).

The next step is to put your LED strip in pairing mode, you do this by pressing the button on the controller for X number of seconds, until the LED strip starts fading blue/red or the little blue diode is flashing on the controller.

After this you can press enter on the raspberry pi so that Tuya-convert can search for your led strip, it will immediately make a backup of the old firmware so you can always roll back if something goes wrong.

The next step is that you will be asked to which firmware you want to install, you will get a selection list of the available firmwares (yours should be on this list) and confirm your choice by entering the number in front of it. After this, the flashing will start and your LED strip will soon come online in ESPHome and in your Home Assistant instance.