Review: Tuya TS1201 Zigbee IR Blaster

TL;DR This blaster works. If you can get it for the right price, it’s worth picking up.

After getting my Bosch air con talking to Home Assistant through a HOBEIAN ZG-IR01, I picked up a second IR blaster for the master bedroom. This time I went for a Tuya TS1201.

What It Is

I bought it from AliExpress for £8.99. It’s a flat, round black puck that reports itself to ZHA as manufacturer _TZ3290_7v1k4vufotpowp9z, model TS1201.

It’s powered over USB-C rather than batteries, which means no more battery swapping, but does mean it needs to be near a power source. The ZG-IR01 runs off two AAAs, but does have the advantage of a couple of extra sensors.

Pairing with ZHA

This is where it beats the ZG-IR01; it worked first time: it paired, and ZHA’s built-in ZosungIRBlaster_ZS06 quirk (from zhaquirks.tuya.ts1201) picked it up straight away. There’s no custom quirk to write, no full restart of Home Assistant, and no sequence-number bug to bodge around¹.

ZHA creates three entities:

• a switch (I don’t know what this does…)
• a firmware update entity (it’s on firmware 0x00000043)
• an identify button

Learning Codes

Learning works the same way as the ZG-IR01: issue IRLearn on the IR Control cluster (0xE004), point the remote at the blaster, press a button and read back last_learned_ir_code. Once it was in learn mode, it read the remote’s codes without any fuss.

The Code Format

What comes back is different though. The ZG-IR01 gives Broadlink-style JgD… codes: a header, then pulse lengths in ticks of 1/32768 s. The TS1201 returns Tuya’s own format, which mildsunrise has documented in a gist. Working from the code back to the signal:

1. Base64-decode the string.
2. Decompress the bytes. It’s FastLZ (level 1), a small LZ77-style scheme, which the gist’s author spotted in a later update².
3. Read the result as 16-bit little-endian numbers. Each one is a duration in microseconds, alternating mark (IR on) and space (IR off), starting with a mark.

So the start of the air con’s tilt code, after decompressing, looks something like this (with the timings rounded):

01234567

3011header mark: 4400 µs

3011header space: 4400 µs

F401bit mark: 500 µs

6806space: 1640 µs, a 1

Drawn out as the signal, those four numbers look like this:

4400 / 4400 µs500 / 1640 µs

headerfirst bit: a 1

That’s a much more sensible unit than the Broadlink ticks, but it means codes from one blaster won’t simply paste into the other. Decoded, the timings matched the ZG-IR01’s captures of the same remote, which is how I captured the air con’s extra buttons. There’s a post on those coming soon.

Sending Codes

The same format goes the other way too. The TS1201 expects the codes it’s sent with IRSend to be in Tuya’s format, not the Broadlink-style codes the ZG-IR01 takes. My bosch_ir integration generates every code itself rather than replaying learned ones, and it only knew how to write the ZG-IR01’s format, so I had to update it to write Tuya codes for this blaster too³.

Once that was sorted, sending just worked. I’d only put the blaster on my desk for testing, without trying to line it up with the AC or anything, and it still got through fine.

Pros and Cons

The Good

• Works with ZHA out of the box, with no custom quirk
• No firmware bug to work around
• Learning codes works first time
• Sending reached the AC from my desk, without lining anything up
• Powered over USB-C, so no batteries to flatten
• £8.99

The Not So Good

• No temperature or humidity sensors, unlike the ZG-IR01
• Codes, learned and sent, are in Tuya’s format, not the Broadlink-style codes the ZG-IR01 uses, so my integration needed updating

Final Thoughts

It works. If you just want a USB-powered IR blaster, get this one. If you want the extra sensors or batteries, consider the ZG-IR01, though you’ll need to add the seq 0 fix yourself.