Controls a Ventair Skyfan DC ceiling fan entirely over its local Tuya LAN protocol (port 6668, AES-encrypted) — no cloud dependency for actual operation once set up. Fan on/off, speed, mode, direction, sleep timer, plus the optional light kit’s on/off, brightness, and color temperature preset. Multiple fans supported via an in-app “Add another fan” button.
Channel invite: SmartThings. Add a little smartness to your things.
Tested against 8 physical units across a full household install — the Skyfan-branded Wi-Fi dongle (the optional add-on accessory making the fan smart) is what this driver actually talks to; should work on any fan using the same dongle.
Requirements
A Skyfan DC fan with the Wi-Fi dongle accessory fitted and already joined to your Wi-Fi (via the Smart Life/Tuya Smart app’s normal pairing flow — this driver doesn’t do initial Wi-Fi provisioning, only ongoing local control after that’s done).
A Tuya IoT Platform developer account (free) — needed once per household, not per fan, to retrieve each fan’s local encryption key. See below, this is the fiddly part.
A SmartThings Hub on the same network/VLAN as the fan(s).
Setup
Part 1 — get each fan’s local key via Tuya’s IoT Platform Tuya’s local protocol needs a per-device AES key (local_key) that isn’t visible anywhere in the Smart Life app itself — you have to pull it from Tuya’s developer/cloud side once, even though the driver never talks to that cloud again afterward.
Go to iot.tuya.com, sign up or log in (free tier is enough). Cloud → Create Cloud Project. Pick a Data Center region that matches your existing Smart Life/Tuya Smart app account’s region —
this matters, get it wrong and the project simply won’t see your devices later with no clear error explaining why. If unsure, check which region your app account signed up under (Tuya’s docs have a region lookup) rather than guessing.
On project creation, it’ll prompt you to subscribe to API services — make sure IoT Core is included (this is what exposes the device-list/device-detail endpoints you need). The free tier’s
default trial subscription covers this. Devices tab → Link Tuya App Account → Add App Account, then scan the QR code shown using the Smart Life/Tuya Smart app on your phone (Me → the QR/scan icon). This authorizes the cloud project to see the devices already paired in your app account — it doesn’t move or re-pair anything. Once linked, your fans should appear under the project’s device list. Grab from the project’s Overview page: your Client ID and Client Secret (used to sign API calls).
Call the API (HMAC-SHA256 signed requests — POST /v1.0/token?grant_type=1 for an access token, then GET /v1.0/iot-01/associated-users/devices) to get each fan’s id (device ID) and local_key. Get the LAN IP from your router/AP’s DHCP client list, matched by the device’s MAC (visible in the app or the Tuya console) or by setting a DHCP reservation per fan so it doesn’t move.
Part 2 — add the device in SmartThings
Accept the channel invite above and enroll your hub. Install the driver (“Skyfan DC” or similar) from the channel. In the SmartThings app: Add Device → Scan Nearby → “Skyfan DC” →
add. Open the new device’s settings and fill in the real IP, local_key, and device ID from Part 1 (overwriting the obviously-fake placeholders). If this specific fan has no light kit fitted, also tick
“No Physical Light” here. Save. Polling starts automatically on save.
For additional fans, use the “Add another fan” button on any existing Skyfan device (in its settings, alongside the light toggle) rather than scanning again — repeat step 4 for each new device it creates.
Why manual credential entry, not auto-discovery
Tuya devices do broadcast locally for discovery (a fixed encrypted UDP format on ports 6666/6667), but SmartThings Edge Drivers can only bind a socket to port 0 (OS-assigned) — never a specific chosen port, Every fan needs its IP/key/ID entered once by hand; there’s no way around it on this platform. (Contrast with this account’s other driver for a similarly “dumb” fan, Big Ass Fans’ Haiku series, also posted on this channel — that one uses genuine mDNS, which SmartThings does natively support, so it’s fully zero-config. Not every LAN protocol is equally friendly here.)
Protocol notes, for anyone extending this or hitting something similar Transport: TCP port 6668, protocol version 3.3, AES-128-ECB encrypted payloads, CRC32 frame checksums. Crypto is hand-implemented in pure Lua (lockbox) since the Edge Driver sandbox has no native crypto.
If your fan’s status reads work fine but every write (on/off, speed, etc.) silently times out, check two things before assuming it’s a network problem — this exact symptom cost a lot of debugging time here before being traced to the actual protocol layer, not the network: Protocol 3.2+ needs a 15-byte clear (unencrypted) header — 3 ASCII version bytes ("3.3") + 12 zero bytes — prepended to the ciphertext on every command except DP_QUERY/DP_QUERY_NEW. Not every Tuya firmware implements the newer CONTROL_NEW (0x0D) command — some devices TCP-acknowledge it and then just never respond at the application layer. The older CONTROL (0x07) command is more broadly supported; worth trying if CONTROL_NEW goes nowhere. Confirmed by diffing raw wire bytes against jasonacox/tinytuya’s own successful write against the same hardware.
Full DP (data point) schema — switch, speed, mode, direction, sleep timer, and the light’s switch/brightness/color-temp-preset — is documented inline in src/init.lua and the README, pulled from Tuya’s full Thing Model API rather than the filtered “standard function” endpoint (which only exposes a subset).
Light kit handling
Some Skyfan units ship without the light kit. There’s a per-device “No Physical Light” preference that switches the device onto a second profile with the light tile removed entirely, rather than showing dead controls for hardware that isn’t there. Set by hand per fan, same as the IP/key/device ID and (optionally) the poll interval — nothing about this driver auto-detects anything, everything’s an explicit preference.
Hiding the “Add Another Fan” button
Once every fan you own is added, the “Add another fan” button on each device’s screen is just clutter. A “Hide ‘Add Another Fan’ Button” preference removes it the same way the light toggle removes the Light tile — a separate, independent switch, so any combination of light/no-light and button-shown/button-hidden works per device. Same manual, per-fan preference as everything else here.
Known limitations
Local key retrieval genuinely requires the Tuya IoT Platform detour above — there’s no way around this, it’s not this driver being lazy, the key simply isn’t exposed anywhere in the consumer app.
Wi-Fi provisioning — the fan needs to already be joined to your network via the Smart Life/Tuya app before this driver can do anything with it.
Only tested against this one Skyfan DC model/dongle. If you hit something broken on a different variant, especially around the CONTROL vs CONTROL_NEW behavior above, I’d like to hear about it.