Today I want to talk to you about the need (or not) for flashing the Shellys now that the Gen4 range and some Gen3 that have been updated, are compatible with Matter and can be linked directly to the Home app without flashing. This. can be very interesting for average users s, but not so much for the power- user. Let me explain why I think you should keep flashing them and what firmware with.
As you know, until just a little while ago it was not possible to link an intelligent relay of the Shelly brand to the Appl House app a. It’s funny because the stack of years ago they were compatible, but for a licensing issue they stopped being… and they spent many years where, to use a Shelly with the Apple ecosystem, you had to flatter it.
The process of flashing was very simple. At first not so much, as a USB cable that was connected to the Shelly pins had to be used to reprogram it at a low level, so to understand us, but little by little the firmware evolved to a specific version of mongoose that allowed to update the Shelys by connecting us directly through the wifi.
About that version I did a little manual on the blog and a YouTube video that has turned out to be the most seen article of all.today, that manual still has visitors. In 5 minutes you have the Shelly flashed and connected to the House app with little chance of screwing it up.
The firmware of Mongoose It’s the pump, it gives us a very simple graphic interface where we can change the behavior of the Shelly completely and do advanced things that can’t be done with the original firmware, automatic timers, that accept opening percentages in blinds, change the order of the push-ups and down… and most importantly of all, gives us the typical HomeKit QR to add to the Home app as if it were a certified device to work with HomeKit, which demonstrated that the device hardware was capable of fulfilling c
on the encryption and privacy standards Apple required on HomeKit-compatible devices but that Shelly’s people, for whatever reason, were not interested in entering or paying or whatever.
Soon after, the guy José Antonio Jimenez best known as RavenSystem, his firmware was evolving Home Accesory Architect, HAA for friends, which was the bomb and made every Shelly a kind of mini-Home-Assistant completely independent. Let’s say it’s kind of an automation framework embedded in a Shelly.
Of course. also allows you to link to the Home app without the need for bridges or briges as if of a native HomeKit device but management was a little more complicated because you don’t have the typical graphical management interface, but you have to fly some scripting because HAA reads a jeyson JSON file for friends where the configuration and behavior you want is. What’s cool about HAA is the community behind it, because if you don’t know how to fight with that specific language, you just have to say in the Discord group what you want to do and soon they answer you with the necessary script… but e
It really takes some flexibility from you.
The times I’ve spoken to José Antonio have been crazy, the guy tells you cases of use that are appearing in his head or in the community and here the limit is literally in your imagination… let’s say that, in addition to turning on or off the light using the Shelly that is the basic idea, you can take advantage of the rest of Shelly for whatever you want… you can do that if the light is turned on too long, let me warn you with an alert to the house app, which is natively not possible to do… or that that Shelly of shit is watching your Wifi and when you connect the mobile of your partner and it is already responding to a home,
Virtual occupation sensor in the Home app, so you can have a «room» between quotes with these sensors with the name of each of your children and so with a simple look at the House app you can know if they are ‘activated’ and are at home or if they have not yet arrived… or you can also know when Apple publishes the new version of iOS because it is reviewing that specific URL… or that it is connected to the Internet and if it is going to be cold that day it will dynamically change the lights in blue tones… and all without anything else, without intermediate platforms, or access to the Internet or Home Assistant for or a Homekeeper. The only inconvenience is… we don’t all have our heads.
e has Raven and we can’t be bothering him all day to tell him ‘is now I want him to go up the blinds at all, just up to 95%’. You feel like you’re wasting his brain. A genius, I tell you.
But good as I was going, I’ll take off. Since 2025 with the presentation in the ESC of Shelly’s Gen4 that already includes Matter support, the rules of the game have changed a bit. It is no longer necessary to flask the device, but just as you take it out of the box is completely plug ‘and’ play and you can link it to the Apple House app, Home Assistant, use Shelly’s native app, use it with Amazon’s cast and Alexa… or all at once. And all that officially, keeping the cacarro guarantee, with your regular updates…
But let’s say that Matter is the least common denominator… or would it be the least common multiple? Man, I never learned that shit. The shortest straw, let’s say in our language, so it exposes the basic functions of the Shelly as they are to turn on and off, to shut down, some show the electrical consumption… and little more, if we want some of the functions we discussed before and take advantage of the processor for something other than a simple switch, we’re fucked, Matter limits you to what the standard and the manufacturer have defined.
Let’s say that Matter sees a Shelly 1, the most basic of all, as a switch… and with HAA you can set that same Shelly for the House app to see as an irrigation valve, a thermostat or a complete alarm system type 11 with its defined states of ‘At home’, ‘Night’, ‘Out of house’ that is monitoring the values of door and window opening sensors.
In addition, with HAA we can do things directly in the Shelly that we would otherwise have to do through shortcuts, I know, that when you touch 3 times the push-button does something concrete or that it goes out automatically after X seconds… and all that without depending on whether the Apple or Home Assistant or Alexa central accessories or whatever is working, so you have literally zero latency. You know that I don’t like this much because I want to have all the automations in the same place so that, when something is missing, you know exactly where the shit is coming from, but for simple and isolated environments like the debugger of the
pool that you have in the village house, you avoid having to set up a church arch just to get activated and send you notifications every X days.
Another advantage we have is privacy., since although Matter is supposed to run in local, the Shelly have the silly habit of trying to connect with the Shelly Cloud to send the states and do God knows what even if you are not going to use Shelly’s native app. However with HAA you forget this as the Shelly communicates with HomeKit via protocol that Bonjour that we have seen a thousand times as a process but we do not know exactly what it is… because it is some kind of UPNP in the routers or a mDNS. The truth is that network protocols have been quite complicated in recent years, making it difficult when everyone spoke TCP / IP with their services.
e SMTP in port 25, the DNS in the 53 UDP, your POP in the 110… now we have applications lifting high-ranking ports. This is a Sindian, as my friend Caesar would say.
If you’re too much of a chatter like Jacobo Vidal and his group quakes From the Clock And you want to use the extra pins on the Shelly plate to put in external temperature or motion sensors, with HAA you can also expose them as instill accessories on HomeKit and this is very cool. My touch of Charly that I’ve already told you about, he mounted a moisture sensor on a basic Shelly in the bathroom so that only the extractor is turned on that which makes so much noise annoying and does not let you focus on porn, so it only activates when there are specific conditions of humidity and temperature… and the p
You do two ways, from Shelly himself or taking both devices to HomeKit and creating the shortcut.
So the decision on whether or not to flash, depends a little bit on the type of user you are.
– If you are a ‘zero complications’ user you want to use the Shelly to turn on and off a light, leave it with the native firmware and you connect it through Matter with Home Assistant or HomeKit to create the automations you want directly from shortcuts or from Home Assistant automations. You can do a thousand things with that device, don’t worry.
– If you are an advanced user that you want not only for the Shelly 2PM to close the garage door, but to stop and notify you if you detect an obstruction, then it is worth it that you dedicate that bit of flashing. Look, don’t think it’s gonna take a half-afternoon, huh? HAA permit
and also the update via OTA, the only thing that will take you a little more time is to learn the jeyson string language… but in the Wiki you have many examples of basic use cases. I set myself once as a target to learn the language of scripting that, which is called MEPLHAA Marvellous Esoteric Programming Language or not… but look, I’m 48 years old, 4 children, several jobs… it doesn’t give me life already for frikadas, when I need something that’s not in the wiki I ask directly in the Discord group, the truth.
And finally, although it’s not a direct advantage of HAA, there is an app called HAA Home app that has historical log, so you save that functionality that is paid for in Controller for HomeKit.
Let’s see, it’s not that you want to push everyone to install HAA as it’s not easy to manage, it’s nothing user- friendly even though in your Discord group they say yes. So if, as I told you before, you’re a user who fits in with Apple shortcuts or with Home Assistant automations, Google Home, etc., you probably don’t need to flatter the device. You save yourself that 10 minutes that will cost you the flashing and learning curve associated with the Marvellous Esoteric, but if you have the same desire to learn that I had a few years ago when I was younger and I had more time and you really want to take out 3000% of your shellys, I recommend you stick to your pa agenda.
He thinks that if you spend 30 minutes on this a day, next year for these dates you will have spent 182 hours and you can come to the podcast to give us more crazy ideas.