How to Live With Sonoff and Home Assistant Without a Daily Headache (and Still Use the TRVZB)

Ideas & Suggestion
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eWeLink has been very busy lately: new firmware for NSPanel Pro and TRVZB, MQTT, “Home Assistant mode,” Matter, F‑Droid…
On paper it looks like a grand opening toward Home Assistant. In practice, it’s more like a polite bow followed by hitting your head on the table.

  1. The integrations exist… just not in the way HA users need
    Yes, I know the firmware odyssey is ongoing and changes keep rolling out - but from a Home Assistant user’s perspective, there’s no meaningful progress.

MQTT sends raw eWeLink JSON. Simple sensors behave, but TRVZB spits out broken entities and warnings because the payload doesn’t match HA’s expectations.

Matter looks promising until you realize the spec is limited and Sonoff exposes only a fraction of the device’s capabilities. HA receives a diet version of the TRVZB with half the calories missing.

SonoffLAN can’t keep up - changing DP formats without documenting anything doesn’t help.

  1. TRVZB is a perfect example of great hardware locked in a tiny cage
    The thermostat itself is excellent.
    The autonomous scheduler is genuinely useful and keeps working even if your network collapses.

The catch?

  • You can’t edit the scheduler anywhere except eWeLink,
  • Sonoff exposes zero scheduler-related DP via Zigbee, MQTT, or Matter,
  • and HA automations are just a prosthetic leg pretending to be the built‑in firmware logic.

TRVZB could have been brilliant - if only we were allowed to talk to it properly.

  1. Why does Sonoff keep disappointing?

Not because the ecosystem is closed. But because it’s closed and:

  • integrations are half‑finished,
  • APIs aren’t documented enough,
  • firmware updates break compatibility,
  • new features don’t fully work in any ecosystem.

One solid, well‑designed HA integration would solve 90% of this.
Most users would happily stay with eWeLink if things simply worked.

How to Live With Sonoff and HA Without Losing Your Mind (and Still Use TRVZB)?

  1. Use NSPanel Pro as your Zigbee coordinator
    It’s the only way to keep the full TRVZB scheduler and proper valve logic.

  2. Use eWeLink Cloud for configuration
    The scheduler is autonomous — and eWeLink is the only place where you can edit it.

  3. Use Home Assistant for higher‑level automation
    HA is great for logic and orchestration, but it won’t replace the TRVZB firmware.

  4. Treat MQTT as a data pipe, not a device integration
    The payload is incomplete, so don’t expect miracles.

  5. Ignore Matter until it grows up
    Right now it’s just another polite bow ending with a forehead‑to‑table moment

Note: This opinion is, of course, wildly exaggerated and not entirely fair — but that’s intentional. It’s meant to spark a tiny moment of reflection in the never‑ending firmware update marathon. And I’d genuinely love to hear whether other users feel the same way, or if I’m just yelling into the smart‑home void.

Let’s actually talk to each other, because asking for new features won’t magically fix the old, very real problems. So how about we treat this as a bit of New Year’s cleanup? And since the Chinese New Year doesn’t arrive until February, we’ve got a generous window — from January 1st to February 17th — to pretend we’re getting our act together.

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