Brilliant Smart Ceiling Fan Remote in Home Assistant

A few months ago I purchased a Brilliant Smart Ceiling Fan Remote or Controller, with the intention of flashing Tasmota on it, and setting it up in Home Assistant. I needed to replace a ceiling fan in our lounge room, and so I also bought a Brilliant Tempest II ceiling fan, which I understood should be compatible with the fan controller. You can see a few photos below, but unfortunately I forgot to take any before I had disassembled the parts, so you'll need to check out the BrilliantSmart product page to see photos before disassembly.

Here is the box...

And the control panel with the cover removed...

And the controller, also with the cover removed...

Fortunately, thanks to some very helpful posts and investigative work from sparkydave, thecubical and exxalmate and posted on the Australia - Electrically Certified Hardware thread on the Home Assistant forums, I knew that this was a Tuya based device, with a secondary microcontroller unit (MCU). Fortunately the TuyaMCU functionality in Tasmota is improving all the time, making it easier to run Tasmota on these type of devices. The Brilliant wall switch I've experimented with previously also relies on a similar arrangement. 

So, after removing the cover from the controller, I could see VCC and GND header holes on the main board. I supplied 3.3V by sticking DuPont cables into the header holes (without soldering) and powered it up. You can just see this in the image above. I started trying to flash it using tuya-convert but it wasn't working. I realised that I needed to supply power, and then press the small button on the side of the main board near the dip switches, in order to get the ESP8266 module into the right mode so that tuya-convert could work its magic. Unfortunately I can't recall whether it was a short or a long press.

I flashed with the most recent version of Tasmota at the time (7.1.1.1), configured WiFi and MQTT settings, and then set up the Tasmota configuration as follows.

 Module 54            # enable TuyaMCU module
 TuyaMCU 11,1         # set Switch1 (fnId 11) to dpId 1 (light on/off)
 TuyaMCU 12,9         # set Switch2 (fnId 12) to dpId 9 (fan on/off)
 TuyaMCU 21,10        # set Dimmer (fnId 21) to dpId 10 (light dimmer)
 DimmerRange 0,255    # set dimmer range
 SetOption59 1        # publish state via MQTT on power command
 SetOption66 1        # publish TuyaReceived via MQTT 

My friendly electrician then came the next day to install the fan controller (and a few other bits and pieces I'll write about in some other posts).

I was pleased to find that the remote control worked perfectly straight away, and I was able to control the above functions using the Tasmota WebUI, which you can see below.

The next step was to get the fan controller working with Home Assistant. I started off just controlling the fan and light on/off state, and the light dimmer, but again, following advice from thecubical and exxalmate, I was able to derive a Home Assistant configuration that also allowed me to set and control fan speeds. You can see the entry in my configuration.yaml file below.

 fan:
  - platform: mqtt  
    name: "Fan Lounge"  
    command_topic: "cmnd/fc_bri_01/POWER1"
    state_topic: "tele/fc_bri_01/STATE"
    state_value_template: "{{ value_json.POWER1 }}"
    speed_command_topic: "cmnd/fc_bri_01/Backlog"
    speed_state_topic: "tele/fc_bri_01/RESULT"
    speed_value_template: >
      {% if value_json.TuyaReceived.Data == "55AA03070005030400010016" %}
        Power1 1; TuyaSend4 3,0
      {% elif value_json.TuyaReceived.Data == "55AA03070005030400010117" %}
        Power1 1; TuyaSend4 3,1
      {% elif value_json.TuyaReceived.Data == "55AA03070005030400010218" %}
        Power1 1; TuyaSend4 3,2
      {% endif %}
    availability_topic: tele/fc_bri_01/LWT
    payload_available: Online
    payload_not_available: Offline
    payload_low_speed: "Power1 1; TuyaSend4 3,0"
    payload_medium_speed: "Power1 1; TuyaSend4 3,1"
    payload_high_speed: "Power1 1; TuyaSend4 3,2"
    payload_off: "OFF"
    payload_on: "ON"
    qos: 1
    retain: false
    speeds:
      - low
      - medium
      - high

To explain this a bit further, dpId 3 is an enum data type which corresponds to the fan speed, and takes values of 0, 1 or 2, corresponding to low, medium and high speeds.  To set the fan speed I configure Home Assistant to send a Backlog command which turns on the fan, and uses the TuyaSend4 command to send a value to dpId 3. Enabling SetOption66 in the Tasmota config means that every time the ESP8266 module receives a message from the MCU it gets published to a RESULT message via MQTT. So, to determine the state of the fan, Home Assistant listens to that RESULT message for a particular command that corresponds to setting of the different fan speeds, and then sets the speed value to the same payload that is passed to the Backlog command to set the fan speed. This is a slightly clumsy solution in that the payload is messy, but it seems to work okay and does not require any Tasmota rules.

This is how the fan looks in Home Assistant.

I have configured the light in Home Assistant as follows.

 light
  - platform: mqtt
    name: "Light Lounge"
    command_topic: "cmnd/fc_bri_01/POWER2"
    state_topic: "tele/fc_bri_01/STATE"
    state_value_template: "{{value_json.POWER2}}"
    availability_topic: "tele/fc_bri_01/LWT"
    brightness_command_topic: "cmnd/fc_bri_01/Dimmer"
    brightness_state_topic: "tele/fc_bri_01/STATE"
    brightness_scale: 100
    on_command_type: "brightness"
    brightness_value_template: "{{value_json.Dimmer}}"
    payload_on: "ON"
    payload_off: "OFF"
    payload_available: "Online"
    payload_not_available: "Offline"
    qos: 1
    retain: false

This configuration seems to work well. I can control the fan from Home Assistant, and Home Assistant is aware of state changes made using the remote control. In addition, the fan is exposed to Google Home and I can control the fan by voice control, or from Google Home devices. Unfortunately there seems to be a glitch with the Google Home app on my phone and fan control does not work properly from there. I can live with that for the time being.