pyMagicSwitchbot

This is a Python library that allows the integration of Magic Switchbot devices in open source projects like home automation.

Product description

The Magic Switchbot device is apparently a clone of the Switchbot manufactured by the Chinese company Shenzhen Interear Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd.

If we open the device (which is easy just lifting a lid), we can see it is based upon a low power and high performance CC2541 SOC chip, manufactured by Texas Instruments. It is compatible with BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) 4.0.

This is the board overview we see when opening the lid:

The device has an internal 360mAh LiPo battery that can be recharged via its MicroUSB connector and according to the manufacturer its charge can last up to 2 or 3 months.

The device has 2 different working modes:

• Switch. In this mode, you can turn on or turn off a device. For this mode to work, the manufacturer provides an extension "hook" that can be attached to the physical switch you want to activate, so that when you turn off it effectively pulls the hook. You can watch a video tutorial in this link.

• Push button.

  In this mode, the device simply pushes the object to which it is attached for a second and then retracts to its original position every time you activate it.

Device API and protocol

The device uses a propietary BLE protocol that I documented based on information provided by the manufacturer and some reverse engineering of the bluetooth logs and the original Android App.

The documentation is published here.

References

The library is based on bluepy, so it does not work on Windows.

The code is strongly influenced by pySwitchbot library by Daniel Hjelseth Høyer (Danielhiversen). My original idea was to modify this library and make it work for both devices families, but the internal working mode is quite different and most of the code was going to be different, so I decided to start a new project but using some of his good techniques and code.

Important Note

IMPORTANT: hcitool and python are not allowed to access bluetooth stack in LInux unless the user is root. To solve it (insecure), you must run these commands if you don' t have the privileges:

sudo apt-get install libcap2-bin
sudo setcap 'cap_net_raw,cap_net_admin+eip' $(readlink -f $(which python3))
sudo setcap 'cap_net_raw+ep' $(readlink -f $(which hcitool))

Using the library

You need Python 3.5 or newer to use the library, and it is published to PyPi. So to use it just fetch it:

pip install pymagicswitchbot

From your program just import the library or only the main class:

import magicswitchbot

--OR--

from magicswitchbot import MagicSwitchbot

Constructor

The library uses a main class called MagicSwitchbot. The constructor gets the device's MAC address as a parameter:

MagicSwitchbot(mac, retry_count=3, password=None, interface=0, connect_timeout=3)

Parameters:

• mac : str (Required) MAC address of the device

• retry_count : int (Optional) Number of retries if the connection does not succeed. Default: 3 times.

• password : string (Optional) Password or PIN set on the device.

• interface : int (Optional) Order of the bluetooth client interface to use. It will be prefixed by 'hci'. Default: 0 (hci0)

• connect_timeout : int (Optional)

  Timeout in seconds for every connection. Default: 3 seconds

Methods

In addition to the constructor, the main class has the following public methods:

• connect(connect_timeout=3, disconnect_timeout=-1) ‑> NoneType Connects to the device

  This method allows us to connect to the Magic Switchbot device.

  Parameters:

  • connect_timeout: int (Optional)

    Specifies the amount of time (in seconds) we'll be waiting for the bluetooth device to connect. If it doesn't connect on time, it returns False.

    This parameter is optional. If you don't specify a value, a 3 seconds timeout is assumed.

  • disconnect_timeout : int (Optional) Specifies the amount of time (in seconds) that will be scheduled to automatically disconnect from the device. If it's not specified, the client does not disconnect until the object is disposed from memory.

    This parameter is optional. If you don't specify a value, a -1 is assumed (no automatic disconnect).

• disconnect()

  Manual disconnect.

• auth() ‑> bool Validation of the password.

  This method allows us to validate the password we provided to the class constructor, and gets the current token that will be used internally on all subsequent method calls.

  Returns bool: Returns True if password is correct.

• is_connected() ‑> bool

  Checks if the device is connected.

  Returns bool: Returns True if the device is still connected

• turn_on() ‑> bool Use the device to switch something on.

  Returns bool: Returns True if the command was sent succesfully.

• turn_off() ‑> bool Use the device to switch something off.

  Returns bool: Returns True if the command was sent succesfully.

• push() ‑> bool Use the device just to push a button.

  Returns bool: Returns True if the command was sent succesfully.

• get_battery() ‑> int

  Gets the device's battery level

  Returns int: Level of the device's battery, from 0 to 100

Example code

The following example shows how to use the library in your Python program:

# Test program (test.py)
from magicswitchbot import MagicSwitchbot
import time, logging

logging.basicConfig(level=logging.DEBUG)

MAC = "00:11:22:33:44:55"

device = MagicSwitchbot(mac=MAC, connect_timeout=10)

res = device.get_battery()
if res:
    print(f"Connected to device {MAC} with {res}% of battery remaining")
    time.sleep(1)
    
    print("Turning on...")
    if device.turn_on():
        print("Command executed successfully")
    else:
        print("Error sending command")
    time.sleep(1)
    
    print("Turning off...")
    if device.turn_off():
        print("Command executed successfully")
    else:
        print("Error sending command")
    time.sleep(1)
    
    print("Pushing...")
    if device.push():
        print("Command executed successfully")
    else:
        print("Error sending command")
else:
    print("Could't get battery status")