Building on last week’s post about flashing smart plugs Tasmota, today I’m going to talk about other custom firmware that you can install on devices with an Espressif ESP chip. Tasmota is the most well-known, but whilst researching how to do the flashing, I’ve come across some others.
Tasmota
Obviously the first one I should mention is Tasmota. It seems to be the most well-used, with active development and lots of features. It’s designed to be used only on ESP32 and ESP8266 boards. Tasmota incidentally is an acronym which stands for Theo-Arends-Sonoff-MQTT-OTA and to this day Theo Arends remains the primary developer.
Recent Tasmota releases have included Matter support, albeit only on ESP32 chips which have more storage than ESP8266.
ESPurna and ESPEasy
I’ve grouped these together, as I found out about them from this blog post by HomeOps which compares them to Tasmota. ESPEasy is actually the oldest, having been around for almost 10 years, but Tasmota and ESPurna both started up around a year later. There’s an update to the blog post which also includes ESPHome, and compares them in a more quantitative way.
Notably, ESPurna only works on ESP8265 and ESP8266 chips, whereas Tasmota and ESPEasy also work on ESP32 chips, such as the one in the m5stack Atom Lite that I turned into a Bluetooth Proxy. Both ESPurna and ESPEasy use MQTT to communicate with other devices.
ESPHome
ESPHome is part of the Open Home Foundation, along with Home Assistant, and as such integrates well with Home Assistant. Unlike the other firmware tools here, ESPHome doesn’t use MQTT by default, although if you build your own firmware with ESPHome then you can add it as an optional extra. Instead, it communicates via Home Assistant’s API. This offers some advantages – it allows Home Assistant to install firmware updates for ESPHome devices. But if you were to switch from Home Assistant to another smart home platform, then you would either need to recompile the ESPHome firmware to add MQTT, or switch to one of the other firmware platforms listed here.
Another thing I’m less keen on about ESPHome is that you use a YAML configuration file to configure devices. I found Tasmota’s web-based interface much more user-friendly.
It’s worth noting that, as well as Espressif chips, ESPHome also works on RealTek RTL8710 and Beken BK7231 series chips too.
OpenMQTTGateway
OpenMQTTGateway is a more specialised firmware designed to make existing non-smart products work over MQTT. It’s best used with BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy), RD, Infrared and old fashioned Serial (RS232) devices. You can buy devices from Theengs which have the OpenMQTTGateway firmware already flashed.
As far as I can tell, OpenMQTTGateway just works on ESP32 chips.
OpenBeken
OpenBeken started out as a way of implementing a Tasmota-like experience on Beken BK7231 chips, but now supports a huge range of chips including ESP32 (but not some other Espressif chips like ESP8826) and RealTek RTL8710. It apparently works in a similar way to Tasmota, but I’ve yet to try it. I have one Tuya device with a BK7231 chip, but I haven’t yet been brave enough to try to flash it. Again, it uses MQTT to communicate with other devices.
