Tuya Smart Connectivity Integration for Airfryer Product

Industry: IoT Devices, Smart Home Appliances

Technologies and processes we used during this project: Software development, Tuya Smart Connectivity Platform, STM32, ESP32

At the time of Project kickoff, Philips Airfryer HD9285 “connected” model was already available on the European, American and other markets worldwide supported by Amazon AWS IoT services.

With this project, the client wanted to enter the China market by integrating the highly popular Tuya IoT platform (replacing AWS) for handling the connectivity part of the system and simplify the “Smart Home” integration for their China customers. 

Philips Domestic Appliances (today Versuni), is a global home appliance company dedicated to creating products that make life at home better and more sustainable.

With a legacy of innovation from Philips, Versuni focuses on delivering smart, high-quality solutions for cooking, cleaning, and caring for the home – selling millions of devices across more than 100 countries.

The project idea was to replace the existing Airfryer Connectivity functionality (based on AWS), with Tuya Smart IoT solution – and doing so as quickly as possible, to arrive to China market as soon as possible.  

With Tuya providing the connectivity part as a stand-alone module – controlled via set of predefined protocol messages (exchanged via serial interface), the main challenge for our team was to modify the existing main MCU Firmware with little-to-no “invasion”, to implement the serial interface communication as defined by the Tuya protocol.  

This was achieved by implementing a “Middleware” code handling all the existing connectivity packets (intended for “old” AWS WiFi module) and translating them to their Tuya counterpart packets, resulting in packets which Tuya WiFi module “understood” and could properly work with – successfully making device live on the Tuya IoT platform. 

With our team delivering a working solution in the matter of weeks, our client was able to quickly produce tens of thousands of appliances for China and enter the market with an Airfryer product supporting a well-known IoT platform in the region. 

Since the “invasion” into existing Firmware was minimal, we avoided introducing unwanted bugs, and testing efforts could mostly be focused on the Connectivity functionalities – shortening the overall time to market. 

Middleware was developed in a modular way, so that any future Philips Airfryer product model could quickly and easily be ported to Tuya platform, with minimal development effort.