Shelly devices are a popular line of smart home products, developed by Allterco Robotics.
They are designed to control and automate various aspects of home environments, including lighting, climate control, and energy management.
Key Features
- Wi-Fi Connectivity
- Mobile App Control: They are controlled through the Shelly Cloud app, available on Android and iOS.
- Voice Control: Many Shelly devices integrate with voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.
- Open API: Shelly devices are known for their open API, allowing integration with various smart home platforms like Home Assistant, OpenHAB, and more.
- Local Control: Most devices can be controlled locally without requiring cloud services, enhancing privacy and reliability.
The local control feature is what really makes Shelly devices a popular choice. See controlling smart home devices.
On this website I will concentrate on local control only.
Managing Shelly Devices
Shelly devices are managed using a web browser.
As with most devices the shelly devices start with a Wi-Fi access point starting with Shelly e.g shelly1 – 84CCA87D7CDC.
You will need to connect to this network and then using a web browser connect to the inbuilt web server on IP address 192.168.33.1.
You can then configure the shelly deive to connect to your local Wi-Fi network.
Shelly devices let you configure a main and a backup Wi-Fi network.
They also let you configure IP settings for each network.
If you configure an IP address then use the same IP address for both networks. see Assigning IP Addresses to Smart Home Devices.
Shelly 1 Home Page Example
To connect to the home page of the shelly device use a web browser on the network to connect to the IP address you allocated to the device.
My Shelly 1 device is assigned an IP address of 192.168.1.41 and so I type http://192.168.1.41.
The top of the home page is shown below:
Notice three icons circled in green at the top the red cloud means cloud service is disable and the red padlock indicates that we do not require a password to connect and manage this device.
Once the device is setup and working on the network setting a username and password.
Again don’t forget to document this. You can either use the same username/password for each device or else have an easy to remember system.
Local Operation
I only use local operation and manage my devices with node-red and/or Home assistant.
For this you need to disable cloud access as shown below:
Disabling cloud access means that you cannot use the Shelly App to manage your devices across the Internet but you can use other methods.
Shelly Tutorials
Related Tutorials and Resources:
- Shelly1 manual
- Sonoff vs Shelly
- Understanding Smart Home APIs
- control Sonoff using Node-red
- How Smart Home Thermostats work
- Smart Home Lighting and Switches