Tuya Hacks
Tuya is a manufacture of IoT devices, they sell their technologies white labelled to a lot of different companies all over the world. For the most part, Tuya uses an industry-standard Microcontroller based the esp8266 Wifi Module, and they provide a lot of information on their website that makers like us can take advantage of.
There is a lot of discussion in the world of Tuya about how to load a non-Tuya firmware onto these devices. There are several reasons why you may want to do this, the most common one that I have seen people talking about is that they don't want there precious data being sent to the cloud.
The irony of this statement is the fact that if you are using the internet, then your already giving google and whoever else all the need to know about you. So if data privacy is your concern, turn off the internet and through away your phone and go back to watching dvd's in your vintage media device.
You should also forget about Home Automation, particularly if you want to consume services like weather or use Netflix, Spotify or any other cloud-based service. The data privacy ship has well and truly sailed my friends, so just adjust to the new reality.
A much more legitimate concern is purely about flexibility, the problem with the Tuya platform is it is a closed system if you have a mixed environment of devices like most of us do, then you would be forced use multiple Home Automation platforms, which is just irritating.
There is an option of using the Tuya API, but it is incredibly crap! It's very slow to update (like in the seconds, not the milliseconds) making it practically useless. The only way around this is to purchase a consumption licence on their platform, and who wants to do that.
So that's how we end up here. In the pages related to Tuya I have provided how-to instructions on how to change the firmware to Tasmota. It's far from an exhaustive list, I will be building it up as purchase new devices that I need to load the firmware on for my own needs. Below are some links to some that I have already completed.