No zigbee control over ewelink app with Ihost

eWeLink CUBE
1

I’m a new user of Sonoff. I was really exited of the announced features and specs.

But I’m a bit surprised when I started testing it.

Zigbee devices are great but not being able to see the status of the devices in the ewelink app is pretty weird. I dont get it. Like you can add as many wifi devices as you want but if you have Zigbee devices you can’t control it remotely and see their status…

I mean, the idea of local lan control is perfect. From my understanding local control means if I loose internet connection then everything that is “local” continues to work.
It doesn’t mean that everything that is local cannot be seen remotely and you cant control anything remotely.

One other thing that would be great. I have Smart Life switches that are running automations. It’s great but I loose internet, everything act up and lights turn on in the middle of the night.
I had the impression that I would be able to take control of all thoses devices with the ihost local router but I dont see any way of doing this. For the switches I think I could reflash them with tasmota firmware but for the light bulbs I still need to figure it out…

1 Like
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Yeah, the original intention of iHost is to make a local gateway which do not rely on the cloud services, so from the first start we don’t make the remote access or remote control as the priority feature, but we do know a lot of users have a similar request, we will evaluate later but not now.

As far as the lights, they don’t have the feature named power-on state, so it is a really frustrated it will be on when power restored, it is a hardware based feature actually, we will keep trying to find a work around to smooth the experience.

3

Thanks for the reply.
I currently own and use a Habitat hub. It’s designed to work locally but you can still access and view everything remotely.

Ihost should really consider this kind of approach. I dont see any benefit of being local only without any possibility to see and monitor what is going on. Think about the alarm feature and door sensor… this is kind of useless if it can be viewed remotely…

1 Like
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+1 problem is same and the tuya/smartlife integration will be good if can use my ihost.

5

You can do this but the onboarding process is really bad.

  1. install the TailScale Docker image
  2. create a dashboard on the iHost with the things you want to control
  3. add your phone to Tailscale and note what IP address the iHost has (it won’t change without reinstalling the docker image)
  4. turn on Tailscale automatic turning on if it is available in your app. On my phone I click on the person on the top right and then “VPN on demand”. It uses split tunnelling so only IP addresses starting in 100 get it. Does not apply if you have a VPN anyway, so you need to manually select which to use as often only 1 can run.
  5. load the IP for the iHost followed by “/cast/“
  6. save the webpage for the iHost dashboard to your home screen.

All done. Now you can see and control Zigbee devices on your phone.