/meross

Tools and documentation for detaching Meross smart product from the cloud

Primary LanguagePython

Table of Contents

About The Project

This is a fork of arandalls repository. I purchased a number of Meross Smart bulbs recently and wanted to completely disassosiate them from the meross cloud to use locally with my custom built REST API. I have created a fork to document my own process for doing this and some additional protocol information related to the bulbs.

Provisioning

If we were to setup the device normally, the flow would look like this:

  • Device is started in a configuration mode, it advertises its own wifi network
  • Phone app connects to the local devices wifi network and calls the following endpoints:
    • Appliance.Config.Key
    • Appliance.Config.Wifi
  • Once the Wifi endpoint has been called the device automatically reboots into its normal mode
  • The device will attempt to make a connection with the meross cloud, using parameters setup during initialisation
  • Depending on whether the initial connection succeeds or not the device will either settle into normal mode or reboot to configuration mode

So in order to fully detach from the meross cloud, we must satisfy the following requirements:

  • Call Appliance.Config.Key and Applicance.Config.Wifi ourselves to configure our own connection parameters
  • Optional Host our own MQTT server during initial setup so that the device makes one successful connection to the MQTT we configure

If we can satisfy this single requirement the device will remain in normal mode and we can turn off the MQTT server, using direct REST calls to communicate with the device going forward.

MQTT server setup

NOTE: Mosquitto setup is entirely optional since meross devices do not care whether the configured MQTT server is online or not

Mosquitto can be used to host a local MQTT server.

Set up the Certificates

The device will try to make a secure connection the the MQTT server, we need to create a local certificate chain to satisfy this.

Make sure that your CA Root uses a different Common Name to your server and the common name for the server is the server IP address

##Create the Certificate Authority

openssl genrsa -des3 -out ca.key 2048
openssl req -new -x509 -days 1826 -key ca.key -out ca.crt

##Create the certificate signing request. It's important when asked for the FQDN in these next step to use the IP or domain name of the machine your MQTT instance is on.

openssl genrsa -out server.key 2048
openssl req -new -out server.csr -key server.key

##Create the final certificate

openssl x509 -req -in server.csr -CA ca.crt -CAkey ca.key -CAcreateserial -out server.crt -days 360

Minimal config

Using Mosquitto, this minimal config sets up the server allowing the device to connect, ensure the path to the cert files is correct.

port 8883

allow_anonymous true
require_certificate false

# replace with your CA Root
cafile ../certs/ca.crt

# replace with your server certificate and key paths
certfile ../certs/server.crt
keyfile ../certs/server.key

Running

mosquitto -c /path/to/minimal.config

Meross scripted setup

A wrapper script is provided under tools/onboard that paramaterises the setup process so that only a single command is required to setup a given Meross device. The following steps can be followed:

  • Ensure that your device is advertising a wifi network and connect to it
  • Run the following to get a list of network devices the device can see: ./onboard --wifi
  • Onboard the meross device: ./onboard --host pc.int --port 8883 --ssid "cool-ssiid" --password "cool_password" --bssid "66:55:44:33:22:11" --channel 5 --encryption 6 --cipher 3

If the ssid of the device is known, the script can be chained together to fill in the wifi parameters automatically from the respective json object:

./onboard --host shitcube.int --port 8883 --password "cool-password" --from-json "$(./onboard --wifi cool-ssid)"

Meross manual device setup

A simple shell script is provided under tools/mCurl to be able to perform REST calls to the device. You must connect to the devices local network before running the setup commands. We can first configure the Appliance.Config.Key endpoint to point at our newly provisioned MQTT server:

Example payload:

{
  "key": {
    "gateway": {
      "host": "192.168.1.100",
      "port": 8883
    },
    "key": "",
    "userId": ""
  }
}

Host should be the same ip used to generate the certificates during the Mosquitto setup.

key and userId can be left deliberatly blank, this simplifies REST calls later on after we enter normal mode

Example Command:

mCurl 10.10.10.1 SET Appliance.Config.Key '{ "key": { "gateway": { "host": "192.168.1.100", "port": 8883 }, "key": "", "userId": ""}}'

We then need to configure the wifi network to connect to. You can ask the device to return the available wifi networks by issuing the following:

> mCurl 10.10.10.1 GET Appliance.Config.WifiList '{}' | jq -r
{
  "header": {
    "messageId": "roomAPI",
    "namespace": "Appliance.Config.WifiList",
    "method": "GETACK",
    "payloadVersion": 1,
    "from": "/appliance/2102255504461490842748e1e94daf56/publish",
    "timestamp": 1632787239,
    "timestampMs": 549,
    "sign": "00001eb7ce289f869256bc95485467de"
  },
  "payload": {
    "wifiList": [
      {
        "ssid": "RElSRUNULUQzNUMyN0Q0",
        "bssid": "9e:ae:d3:5c:a7:d4",
        "channel": 5,
        "signal": 83,
        "encryption": 7,
        "cipher": 6
      },
...

You can then use this to build up the Appliance.Config.Wifi payload, example:

{
  "wifi": {
    "ssid": "RElSRUNULUQzNUMyN0Q0",
    "bssid": "9e:ae:d3:5c:a7:d4",
    "channel": 5,
    "encryption": 7,
    "cipher": 6,
    "password": "Y29vbF9wYXNzd29yZA=="
  }
}

password is a base64 encoded string of your wifi password, you can obtain this by doing:

printf "cool_password" | base64 -w0

Example Command:

mCurl 10.10.10.1 SET Appliance.Config.Wifi '{"wifi":{"ssid":"RElSRUNULUQzNUMyN0Q0","bssid":"9e:ae:d3:5c:a7:d4","channel":5,"encryption":7,"cipher":6,"password":"Y29vbF9wYXNzd29yZA=="}}'

If all goes well the device should now reboot, connect to your network and then you should see a connection come in on the MQTT server logs.

After this point the device is configured and you can switch off the MQTT server. If something went wrong you can get the device back to configuration mode by slowly turning the light switch on and off ~ 5 times.

Usage

You can now use the same mCurl tool to call endpoints, if the device has taken ip 192.168.1.148 for example you can toggle the device on and off by issuing the following:

mCurl 192.168.1.148 SET Appliance.Control.ToggleX '{"togglex":{"onoff": 0}}'
mCurl 192.168.1.148 SET Appliance.Control.ToggleX '{"togglex":{"onoff": 1}}'

See the [protocol] page for details on how to construct your own REST calls. The two important commands for bulbs specifically are Appliance.Control.ToggleX and Appliance.Control.Light

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the following project that got me off to a good start.