Background

This activity started for me, out of unwillingness to pay $50 for a z-wave remote wall dimmer. I really only needed a dimmer, connection to my home automation system in this application was secondary. I found the Meross MS560 available on Amazon for $25 and bought it. I installed it and found it worked fine with my LED kitchen table light and when connected to the Meross phone app, I could control it remotely.

It was at this point, I became interested in connecting it to my Home Automation system (for me Homeseer). With a lot of searching, I came up with little until I came across: https://github.com/albertogeniola/MerossIot

Alberto reverse engineered the protocols between the Meross devices, thier phone app, and the Meross MQTT cloud server. He has documented these and created some code to be able to inject commands into the devices. His approach leaves the devices connected to the Meross cloud server. This has the advantage that the Meross app sill works, with the disadvantage of the security risks of that internet based connection.

Also found on Alberto's github site is some conversations about programming the device to use a local MQTT server instead of the Cloud Meross server. Some example code of configuring a meross device to use Mosquitto can be found at the following site: https://github.com/bytespider/Meross/tree/master/bin/src

With the concept of using a local MQTT server and creating a driver to interface to Homeseer, this project was created. I targeted Node-Red since it was easy to interface to MQTT messages and it gave me an oppertinity to learn the 'language'.

The implementation in this node-red flow is based upon a minimal implentation and is specifically valid with the MS560 dimmer and the MS425 power strip.