Hi everyone!
It has taken a considerable number of sleepless weekends, coding sprints and a river of coffee, but eventually it's here: the Meross Local Add-On has been released on alpha stage.
The Addon is a component developed to emulate the Meross Cloud, which runs directly on HomeAssistant as stand-alone addon. The Addon, together with the Custom Pairer App, enables the usage of Meross Hardware devices without having an Internet connection or relying on the Meross Cloud.
The local addon definitely resolves the problem of Meross Security team banning accounts due to high frequency API calls to the cloud, and makes it possible to have more responsive and fast automation on HomeAssistant.
You might think: but if I do that, I lose the possibility to remote control my Meross devices with the official Meross App, right? The answer is: no, if you don't want! Infact, the Local Addon is designed to support the "proxy mode" or "meross link", which will basically replicate all the messages from local addon to the Meross official cloud (five that you use your official meross account login). In other words, the local addon works as the "core" but also sends a copy of the messages to the cloud (and vice-versa), so that the Meross app still works. If Meross bans your account, the local addon will still be working and you don't loose access to your devices via HA. However, if you really are using the Meorss devices to their lit, I suggest not to rely on Meross Link, as this will definitely be unproductive and will cause your account to be banned.
The local addon is available here:
https://github.com/albertogeniola/ha-meross-local-broker
Instructions on how to set it up are here:
Please note that the local addon is still on alpha stage and there might be huge changes in the future to make it stable and fix the bugs that will arise. Therefore, for the time being, use this addon just for testing purposes and avoid converting your entire HA system to the Local Addon architecture.
Before saying goodbye, I'd like to thank all the supporters who propelled my work with great coffe and donations. This project had seen the light because of your tips and support. Thanks again!