Very happy you sorted that problem! I'll say that I agree with HomeKit's perspective. If you really want to change device types, just delete the thing and start over. (This will also help avoid bugs in all the code I wrote to deal with changing device types - ugh).
Or just start over without deleting: You can always make another device (or 10) with the same IP and the plugin will handle it properly. The plugin does several loops to poll the device as little as possible. It first loops through every device this plugin created and adds their IPs to a de-duplicated-list. Then it loops through each IP to poll the device (I imagine most people only have 1). After that it loops the devices again and matches the IP to update the states. So if the IP is assigned to 10 devices, it still only gets polled once per interval.
As an example, you can create a sprinkler device and also assign the zones to relay devices. I did this for a while to make monitoring easier. It was easier to me to monitor a device than a sprinkler because I still don't understand sprinklers (in Indigo) very well.
Next:
I'm temped to create a dedicated socket to this device that never closes, and simply send DUMP every tenth of a second or so. I'll probably play around with this idea at some point and see if it has merit. If anyone else knows python and wants to let me know that'd be slick too. (I have a million projects......) This could allow us to make the input sensors extra useful and very responsive.
Additionally I just emailed the board manufacturer to ask for some improvements and features. I don't expect existing boards to be updated, but new boards may get some of the things I asked for. I also noticed new versions of the board have a few new features like being able to change (TCP) ports, spoof MAC (probably because they don't have a real MAC pool to use), lost-power states, and a few other things that seem worthless.
They have a ton of other products that may work with this plugin:
https://www.thanksbuyer.com/index.php?r ... ay%20board - including an 18 channel board. Anyone run a grass growing company and need to control valves? haha