Mongoose wasn't dead, it was out on a bender

(This text was generated from the podcast transcript. Forgive any errors in phrasing and the short sentences) Well, well, well, let’s see, today I want to talk to you about Mongoose, the firmware we’ve used from the very beginning to flash our Shellys, you know the one. It looked like for the past few months development had stopped, in fact we were starting to suspect they weren’t going to continue, but it wasn’t dead, it was just out partying! These past few days they’ve released a new version, and honestly it’s packed full of news, including the long-awaited support for the Shelly Plus 2PM, you know, the replacement for the Shelly 2.5 we used for the blinds.

Shellys and Apple HomeKit: a love-hate story

I think by this point everyone knows that a Shelly can’t connect directly to HomeKit. At the beginning, when the Shellys first came out, it was actually possible, and you could pair a Shelly through the Home app like any other device, but then they lost that support. It seems it was over some licensing or royalty issue, definitely a money thing, but the fact is Shelly ended up unable to integrate with HomeKit. Because of this, several alternative firmwares came out. There was a point when there were a ton of them, but around here I’ve talked to you before about Tasmota, which as you know now offers Matter support, about my beloved Home Accessory Architect, the HAA, which I’ve talked about a ton lately because it’s insane, and I plan to talk about it a lot more soon… but the one we’ve used the most, the one from the famous guide for flashing a Shelly, is Mongoose. And it’s true that Mongoose is the simplest of them all, meaning flashing a Shelly device, that is, installing the firmware on a Shelly, is nothing, four clicks and that’s about it, it’s really easy, and anyone who has no clue how to flash a device can do it in a really simple way. Until now, HAA, for example, recommended flashing via cable, because the cable connection is more stable, or otherwise we had to go through an intermediate TasMota firmware before being able to install HAA. It’s true that in the new version this is now supported, but even so it’s still a bit more complicated to manage, because afterward, once you’ve got it flashed with HAA, you have a scripting language that’s a bit complicated. It’s true that their Discord support group works like a charm, but it’s also true that there are plenty of folks who don’t even have Discord installed, so downloading the app, signing up, joining the group and introducing yourself by saying «Hey, I want to do this with a Shelly,» well, that takes away a bit of flexibility or accessibility for the more novice users who just want to grab a Shelly, flash it, and drop it straight into HomeKit to turn a switch on or off. And with Mongoose, well, we get all that in 5 minutes without any issues. The thing is, for a bunch of years we were using the Shelly 2.5 model for the blinds and for the double-channel switches, and it worked really well, you could flash it with Mongoose without any problems. But our friends at Shelly discontinued the 2.5 and put out the new Shelly Plus 2PM device, and until this latest version, it wasn’t supported by Mongoose. After many months without any news, suddenly the folks at Mongoose came out of nowhere with a new version, 2.12.1, which has a ton of improvements, some more important than others. Of course, it also fixes a bunch of errors, bugfixes, all of that is patched up, now it’s supposed to work better and so on, we also get new support for the Shelly Plus 2PM as we mentioned earlier, well, actually they’ve added support for all the Plus models, since as you know all the new models have a lot of Plus, a lot of Pro devices to fit inside the panel, etc. They’ve also got dark mode for the web interface, which to me seems like a dumb thing, but they’ve announced it with a ton of fanfare because there are a lot of dark mode fans out there. We also now have support for HomeKit’s adaptive lighting, I don’t know if you’ve tried this, but when you add a smart bulb in HomeKit, it does support this adaptation, meaning that throughout the day the light can automatically change temperature, so during the day it leans a bit more toward yellow, for example, and at night it’s a bit cooler, leaning more toward white, or the intensity changes gradually, and Apple handles all of that automatically, you don’t have to do anything as long as you have a bulb that supports this method. Well, now the Mongoose folks support this too within the settings, you can say that this switch, that bulb, whatever, should automatically adapt to daylight, honestly I’ve never used it myself, since I like my bulbs to always have a warm light, no matter the time, and if at some specific moment I need, I don’t know, more light or something like that, I just switch it to cool, but always manually. Support has been added in HomeKit for Shelly’s carbon dioxide detector, which honestly is a really interesting gadget. Keep in mind that almost all Shellys connect to our network via Wi-Fi, and there are people who don’t like that, some prefer ZigBee devices or Thread devices. I’ll tell you right now that anything that can have Thread, which is supposed to be the new optimized protocol and all that, I’ll have it on Thread, but as of today Thread still isn’t very mature, in fact sometimes you end up with several different Thread networks from different devices, from different manufacturers who each created their own network, so it still has a bit of maturing to do. And well, it’s true that Wi-Fi, if you have a good router, like in my case I have the Eero mesh system, and well, you can imagine I have a gazillion devices connected to Wi-Fi, and it works great for me, works like a charm, but it’s true that some people say Wi-Fi devices, by connecting to Wi-Fi, are going to consume a bit more power, so if they run on batteries, you might run out of battery sooner than with ZigBee or Thread devices, and that’s true, but it hasn’t caused me any problems, not with latency or anything like that, so I don’t mind at all putting in Shelly devices that connect via Wi-Fi. And that’s the case with the support, I mean, with this carbon dioxide detector, which is Wi-Fi, so there are people who don’t want a detector like this to be Wi-Fi, well, the thing is the detector is going to work the same either way, meaning if you have smoke in the house, it’s going to beep like any regular smoke detector, that is, if the house is burning down, the wiring’s on fire, the router’s gone, whatever, and you lose Wi-Fi, the gadget is still going to beep just the same, so on that front it doesn’t worry me at all, and it’s true that the one I currently have is the Aqara one, which works really well, it’s certified by Honeywell, which is a longtime brand for smoke, carbon dioxide detection devices and so on, and it connects via ZigBee, but that means you either need a universal ZigBee 3.0 device like the Sonoff we use in Home Assistant, or you need Aqara’s own bridge, so I think the Shelly cuts down on complexity because you connect it straight to Wi-Fi. Anyway, all this to say that the Mongoose folks have added support for that carbon dioxide detector, which tells you the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the air and so on, and they’ve added it to HomeKit. And then some minor things, more or less silly, like something that’s happened to me before, where when typing in the Wi-Fi password while setting up the Shelly, you’d just click apply and if you’d typed it wrong, well, it would go straight to hell, you’d have to reset it, go back in through the local IP and stuff like that. And now it asks you for confirmation, and honestly that’s a huge step forward, a huge step forward. But anyway, as you can see, a bunch of interesting new features that bring Mongoose back into the spotlight as one of the most interesting options for flashing a Shelly. I’m going to keep recommending Mongoose to anyone who doesn’t have much of a clue, who doesn’t want to tinker around much, and who just wants to, well, flash the device and start using it right away without any fuss.