firmware

Converting a Tasmota smart plug to ESPHome

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A photo of a Coosa smart plug, originally running Tuya firmware, and a USB to UART converter. This now runs ESPHome firmware.

Back in June, I flashed some old Tuya Wi-Fi smart plugs with Tasmota firmware. I’ve now re-flashed one of them with ESPHome, an alternative firmware by the Open Home Foundation who are the same people as Home Assistant. In this blog post, I’m going to outline:

  • Why the change from Tasmota to ESPHome
  • How to build a YAML file for ESPHome
  • The flashing process

This is a longer blog post, so if you want to skip the explanations for each section of the YAML file and just want to go ahead and do this yourself, you can download my pre-made YAML file from GitHub, and then follow these instructions.

Why the change from Tasmota to ESPHome

If you’re starting out with custom firmware for your existing devices, then I would still recommend Tasmota. It’s much easier to set up, as you install it first, and then configure it. There’s also a much more extensive repository of supported devices, so you shouldn’t need to do much manual tinkering once Tasmota is installed.

ESPHome, by contrast, requires you to configure it first, and then install it. Furthermore, rather than offering a web interface for configuring your devices, instead you have to do this in a YAML file. And then you have to compile the firmware specifically for your device and upload it.

That being said, ESPHome is much more powerful. You can build automations into it that run on the device itself, rather than through, say, Home Assistant. And as each firmware binary is compiled for each device, it’s much smaller, which allows for easier updates. On some Tasmota devices, you have to install a ‘minimal’ version of the firmware before you can upgrade. By contrast, with ESPHome, your device should be able to update directly to new firmware versions.

As you would expect, ESPHome integrates better with Home Assistant. Indeed, one reason for me changing to ESPHome is that the Tasmota integration takes a while to start up and is one of those slowing Home Assistant down. Firmware updates are also offered through Home Assistant, so you don’t need something like TasmoAdmin to manage firmware updates for multiple Tasmota devices.

Building the YAML file

I’m going to go through each section of the YAML file, to explain what it does, and why it’s necessary. Some of these are specific to the plugs that I’m using, and may not transfer to other devices.

Firstly, with Tasmota still running, open the Configuration screen and choose Template. This will give you a list of the GPIO pins, and what they currently do in Tasmota. You’ll need to note these, so that you can tell ESPHome what pins to use. On mine, these were the ones in use:

  • GPIO4 – LED
  • GPIO5 – Relay
  • GPIO13 – Button

The LED is the light on the smart plug, the relay is what controls whether the power is on or not, and the button is the physical button on the smart plug that controls the relay. Whilst the relay is the most important, to preserve the device’s full functionality, we need to tell ESPHome about all of them.

The ESPHome section

Here’s the first bit of the YAML file:

esphome:
  name: $name
  friendly_name: $friendly_name

esp8266:
  board: esp01_1m

If you use the wizard in the ESPHome Device Builder, then these will have been created for you and filled out with whatever name you’ve chosen. The second block tells ESPHome that the device has an ESP8266 chip, and it’s a generic board. This was the default selection and seemed to work fine for me.

Logging, API, OTA, Wi-Fi

Next, we have the following:

# Enable logging
logger:

# Enable Home Assistant API
api:
  encryption:
    key: $key

ota:
  - platform: esphome
    password: $password

wifi:
  ssid: !secret wifi_ssid
  password: !secret wifi_password

  # Enable fallback hotspot (captive portal) in case wifi connection fails
  ap:
    ssid: "esphome-smartplug"
    password: $fallbackpassword

captive_portal:

The logger means that the device will keep logs. It’s up to you whether you keep this in, but as I was coming up with this myself, I decided it would be best to help debugging.

Because I’ll be using this smart plug with Home Assistant, we need to include the ‘api:‘ section. Again, the ESPHome device builder should have filled out an API key here.

The ‘ota:‘ section allows for ‘over the air’ updates. This means that your device can update to new versions of ESPHome without needing to be plugged in to a device, either over USB or a UART connection.

In the ‘wifi:‘ section, this includes references to the ESPHome Device Builder’s secrets file which should have your Wi-Fi network SSID and password. If the smart plug can’t connect using these details, then, as a fallback, it’ll create its own access point. This is where we also need the ‘captive_portal:‘ section, which allows the user to select a Wi-fi network if the one we’ve pre-programmed can’t be found.

Web server

Next, we have this section:

web_server:
  port: 80

This is optional, but it creates a Tasmota-like web app that you can connect to. This will allow you to press the button on the smart plug, view the logs, and upload firmware. We don’t need it, but it partially replicates the functionality of the previous Tasmota firmware, and helps with debugging.

Binary sensor

This is the section that enables the hardware button on the smart plug to work:

binary_sensor:
  - platform: gpio
    pin:
      number: GPIO13
      mode: INPUT_PULLUP
      inverted: True
    use_interrupt: True
    name: "Power Button"
    id: "smartplug_button"
    on_press:
      - switch.toggle: "smartplug_relay"
    disabled_by_default: True

We’re telling ESPHome that the button is attached to GPIO pin 13, and, when the button is pressed, to toggle the relay on or off. I’ve also added the ‘disabled_by_default: True‘ line so that it doesn’t show in Home Assistant.

Switch

Now, we need to configure the relay, and make it available to Home Assistant:

switch:
  - platform: gpio
    name: "Switch"
    id: "smartplug_relay"
    pin: GPIO5
    on_turn_on:
      - output.turn_on: led
    on_turn_off:
      - output.turn_off: led
    restore_mode: RESTORE_DEFAULT_ON

So, we’re telling Home Assistant that the relay is connected to GPIO pin 5. We’re also telling it to turn on the LED when the relay is turned on, and off again when it’s turned off. The ‘restore_mode: RESTORE_DEFAULT_ON‘ tells ESPHome what to do when the device boots up, perhaps after a power cut. I’ve set it to try to restore the status that it had before, but if it can’t, to turn the relay on.

LED

Here’s our final block, to tell ESPHome that there’s an LED

output:
  - platform: gpio
    pin: GPIO4
    inverted: true
    id: led

Again, we tell ESPHome that it’s connected to GPIO pin 4. The YAML code in the Switch section tells ESPHome when to turn the LED on or off.

So, now we have a YAML configuration file. This should be added as a new device in the ESPHome Device Builder.

The flashing process

The good news is that switching from Tasmota to ESPHome is easier than from the original Tuya firmware. You probably won’t have to get out a UART converter and cables, unless you accidentally brick your device. Instead, you just need to follow these instructions, which involve manually downloading the firmware binary, and then uploading it to Tasmota. When the device restarts, it’ll be running ESPHome instead.

Tasmota firmware upgrade failing due to lack of storage space

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A screenshot of the Tasmota firmware upgrade screen on the web interface

Once you’ve switched your ESP devices from the stock proprietary firmware to Tasmota, the good news is that future firmware upgrades to newer Tasmota versions should be straightforward. You just need to open your device’s web interface, and do an over-the-air (OTA) upgrade, or use something like TasmoAdmin to bulk-upgrade multiple devices. At least, that’s how it works in theory.

What you may find is that the update fails, due to a lack of storage space. So today, I’m going to outline four possible workarounds that you could try if your Tasmota firmware upgrades fail.

Why is there a lack of storage space?

Firstly, a bit about why this happens. You’re most likely to encounter this error with devices that use the ESP8266 chip. Some of these chips come with as little as one single megabyte of flash memory storage, and the standard build of Tasmota is 656 kilobytes (as of version 15.0.1 which is the latest at the time of writing). There simply isn’t enough space for both the current firmware and the new firmware to sit side-by-side ahead of the update process.

Now that we understand why the problem occurs, we can try some solutions.

Solution 1: gzipped binaries

As long as you’re upgrading from a version newer than Tasmota 8.2 (which came out over five years ago now), you can use the smaller gzipped binaries. This reduces the standard Tasmota 15.0.1 release binary down to 469 kilobytes.

However, on some of my devices, that was still too big – 656 plus 469 is more than 1024 kilobytes and exceeds the capacity of the 1 MB flash storage.

Solution 2: install tasmota-minimal first

There are a couple of slimmed down versions of Tasmota:

  • tasmota-lite – a cut-down version of Tasmota without many of the sensors or drivers included
  • tasmota-minimal – the bare-minimum of Tasmota which can’t do anything apart from be upgraded to the full firmware

What you can do is install the latest version of tasmota-minimal first, and then the latest standard version of Tasmota. tasmota-minimal is only 265 kilobytes, and so it’s small enough to fit alongside the standard firmware. Once installed, there’s then space for the full version to be installed.

When you do an OTA upgrade, this is the process that should happen – tasmota-minimal gets installed first, and then the full version. But if it doesn’t, you can do this manually yourself. Your device settings, such as the GPIO mappings and MQTT settings, will be retained during the process.

Solution 3: tethered firmware update

A tethered update is where you use another device, such as a PC, to update the firmware. This means physically connecting the device to the PC. It gets around the storage limitation as the firmware doesn’t need to be downloaded to the device running Tasmota first.

How easy this will be will depend on the device, and where it is. If you’re running Tasmota on a development board, such as a Wemos D1 or m5stack Atom, then you can plug in into your PC with a standard USB cable (as long as it’s a data and power cable). However, if your device is buried away somewhere inaccessible, or is a consumer device that requires disassembly and a USB to UART converter, then you may not want to do this every time a new version is released.

Solution 4: Compile Tasmota yourself

The standard builds of Tasmota cover most common use cases. However, as Tasmota is open source, you can compile it yourself. That way, you can create a smaller, customised build for your device that doesn’t include any extra functions that aren’t needed. There are tools available to do this, but this is really only for advanced users – especially as you’ll need to recompile the binaries for each release.

Solution 5: Switch to a different firmware

As I mentioned last month, Tasmota is not the only game in town. If you also use Home Assistant, then consider replacing Tasmota with ESPHome.

ESPHome has a higher learning curve, due to its use of YAML configuration files. But, once this is set up, it’s easier to compile new binaries each time a new version of ESPHome is released. And, if you’re lucky, you’ll be able to download a pre-built YAML file from the ESPHome Device Repository. Just be aware that it’s not as extensive as the Tasmota Supported Devices Repository – the ESPHome repository has details of around 600 devices compared to almost 3000 for Tasmota. I wasn’t able to find an exact match for ESPHome for my smart plugs, for example.

ESPHome has some other advantages. For example, you can edit the YAML configuration to tell Home Assistant what type of device is plugged in, say a light. That means it’ll appear in Home Assistant as a light, rather than a switch, without needing to use the Change device type of a switch helper.

As with solution four, having a smaller firmware binary will make future OTA updates easier, and these updates can be managed through Home Assistant.

Tuya-Cloudcutter

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A Tuya IR and RF bridge that has been flashed with new firmware using tuya-cloudconverter

Last year, I wrote about a tool called ‘tuya-convert’ which exploits a vulnerability in ESP-based Tuya devices to install custom firmware such as Tasmota. But not all Tuya devices use ESP chips, and that’s where tuya-cloudcutter comes in.

I have one such device, an ‘S11’ RF and IR bridge (pictured above) that I picked up cheaply from AliExpress last year. Instead of one of Espressif’s ESP chips, it comes with a Beken BK7231N chip. Having disassembled its case, I also didn’t find any obvious pins for the UART bus. So I was relieved to come across tuya-cloudcutter, as it doesn’t require any soldering or disassembly. tuya-cloudcutter should work with any devices that use the BK7231T and BK7231N chips.

Like tuya-convert, tuya-cloudcutter exploits a vulnerability. This was responsibly disclosed to Tuya (the bug bounty was donated to charity), and newer devices are shipped without this vulnerability. However, there’s no firmware update for my S11 device to fix the issue, which is perhaps poor from a security perspective but suits my needs right now.

Running tuya-cloudcutter on a Raspberry Pi

You’ll need to run tuya-cloudcutter on a Linux device, and a Raspberry Pi is perfect for this. Indeed, there’s a detailed tutorial to follow. You’ll need Python, Docker, Git and NetworkManager installed and enabled, and there are a couple of configuration files to edit before you start. Everything is done using a command prompt, so you could do it over SSH using a Windows machine with Putty if you wanted to.

A note: I first tried this on my nine-year-old’s Raspberry Pi 400, and it didn’t work, whereas it did on my Raspberry Pi 4. I believe it was an issue with the specific Wi-Fi adaptor in the Raspberry Pi 400.

You may find that it’s easier to have the device already set up in the Tuya or Smart Life app, as you’ll be able to find the existing firmware version. You’ll need this when running the tuya-cloudcutter tool.

Detaching and flashing

tuya-cloudcutter offers two modes:

  1. Detach – this leaves the Tuya firmware intact on the device, but detaches it from the Tuya cloud. You can then use the LocalTuya or TuyaLocal custom Home Assistant integrations from HACS to control your device, but the official Tuya and Smart Life apps won’t work anymore.
  2. Flash – this also flashes new firmware onto the device.

In terms of firmware choices, by default you get:

  • OpenBeken – a Tasmota-like firmware where you can configure the device
  • ESPHome Kickstart – a minimal version of ESPHome, which can be updated later.

You can also add your own firmware, although be careful as you may brick your device if the firmware isn’t configured correctly.

If you choose to flash new firmware, then when the tool has run correctly, you’ll see a new Wi-Fi network appear for you to connect to. The Hotspot login page should open automatically, but if not, go to http://192.168.4.1/ to proceed. You can then configure the firmware to connect to your Wi-Fi network.

Switching firmware later

For my device, I tried OpenBeken first, but found that it wasn’t able to use the RF capabilities of the device. Instead, I built an ESPHome configuration, using the tuya_rf custom component, and flashed that, using OpenBeken’s OTA firmware updater. Because once you’ve used tuya-cloudcutter to install new firmware on a device, you don’t need to use it again – you can switch from OpenBeken to ESPHome and vice versa quite easily.

Also, if you read yesterday’s post about the Sonoff RF Bridge, no, this RF bridge didn’t work with my doorbell either.

Portisch firmware on a Sonoff RF Bridge

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A AZDelivery D1 development board that I've used to flash Portisch firmware on a Sonoff RF Bridge

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about flashing Tasmota firmware onto some old Tuya smart plugs, using a USB to UART converter and some Dupont jumper cables. I also flashed Tasmota onto a Sonoff RF Bridge, which I’d bought to listen to doorbell presses. This meant that the RF Bridge would work with Home Assistant without needing a HACS integration or addon, and wouldn’t need to rely on cloud services to run.

However, inside every Sonoff RF Bridge there are two wolves chips with firmware. There’s an ESP8266 chip, which handles the Wi-Fi side of things, and an OBS38S003 chip which handles RF communication. I have the latest R2 v2.2 model; older ones have a different RF chip.

The default iTead firmware on the RF chip has been locked down to only support a limited number of RF messages. That’s fine if your device is supported, but my doorbell isn’t. So even with Tasmota installed, pressing the button my doorbell didn’t do anything as the RF firmware was programmed to ignore it.

Portisch RF fimrware

The OBS38S003 RF chip can be flashed with ‘Portisch’ firmware, which allows all RF messages to be received and decoded. However, whereas the ESP9266 chip has UART pins that don’t require any soldering to access, the OBS38S003 doesn’t support a UART bus. There are therefore two ways to get around this:

  1. Modify the board using additional soldered cables and cutting some lines on the board
  2. Using another circuit board, flashing firmware onto that, and then using the flashing board to flash the chip.

I went with option 2 – I don’t have a soldering iron to hand, and didn’t want to make a mistake and damage the board beyond repair. Instead, I bought this AZDelivery D1 NodeMCU Wi-Fi Development Board (sponsored link). There are a number of ‘D1’ boards out there – Wemos make the most well-known – but this was £7 and available from Amazon. Ironically this board also contains an ESP8266 chip.

Flashing the development board

To flash the D1 board, I needed to install two things:

  1. The Arduino IDE
  2. Python

I installed both, and then followed the instructions that came with the AZDelivery D1 board to set it up as a board in the Ardunio IDE. Next, I loaded the OnbrightFlasher into the Ardunio IDE and flashed it onto the D1 board. Make sure that use a micro-USB cable that supports both data and charging – a charging-only cable will power the device, but you won’t be able to connect to the D1.

Next, it was time to connect the D1 board to the Sonoff RF board. From here, it’s best to follow this tutorial from the ‘Erasing the MCU (RF chip) on the PCB‘ heading, with the following notes:

  • I only got a garbage response from the ‘handshake’ command until I amended the baud rate to 115200 in the Arduino IDE.
  • When it comes to running the flashScript.py script, open a command prompt first, and then run the script.
  • For the OBS38S003 firmware, there are 4 different firmware versions that you can flash. I had the most luck with the one called ‘portisch_main_OB38S003_BUCKET_SNIFFING_INCLUDED.hex‘.
  • If you haven’t already flashed Tasmota, make sure that you flash the ‘tasmota-sensors’ version rather than plain vanilla Tasmota.
  • If you have ESPHome on your Sonoff RF Bridge (see here for the YAML configuration), rather than Tasmota, you may have more luck with rcswitch_main_OB38S003.hex (I haven’t tried this myself)

Once the firmware is flashed, you can disconnect everything, put your Sonoff RF Bridge back together.

Testing the Portisch firmware

In Tasmota, open the Console and type in ‘rfraw 1‘ and press enter to enable Portisch. Then type ‘rfraw 192‘, and the device should beep. You can then type ‘rfraw 177′ and the Sonoff RF Bridge will go into ‘bucket sniffing’ mode – this will display the various codes being broadcast on the 433 MHz band. There’s more guidance on the Tasmota device page and RF commands section.

So, is my doorbell smart now?

The bad news is that, despite all this work, I haven’t been able to use the RF Bridge to capture my doorbell’s signals to turn them into actions in Home Assistant. The codes being sent by my doorbell seem to rotate, presumably so that only the receivers in my house respond and not someone else’s. And, the 433 MHz channel is also very noisy – there are lots of codes being sent by other devices like a frustrating game of Numberwang.

Basically, if I want to have a smart doorbell, I’m going to need to just buy an actual smart doorbell, aren’t I? At least I have an ESP development board to play with now.

Flashing Tuya smart plugs with Tasmota

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A photo of a Coosa smart plug, originally running Tuya firmware, and a USB to UART converter. This now runs ESPHome firmware.

Last year, I wrote about using a tool called tuya-convert to replace the firmware on my Tuya smart plugs. The firmware in question is Tasmota, which is an open source replacement firmware for devices with Espressif ESP chips. All my Tuya smart plugs have an ESP8266 chip, which can take custom firmware.

There are two ways of flashing Tasmota onto Tuya devices – an easy way, and a harder way.

There’s also a kind-of third ‘super-easy’ way, that I’ll mention towards the end.

tuya-convert – the easy way

I mentioned tuya-convert, which is a command line tool that exploits a vulnerability in older Tuya firmware to install Tasmota. You’ll need a computer such as a Raspberry Pi that has both Wi-Fi and Ethernet, and a smartphone. The tuya-convert tool then creates a hotspot that your Tuya devices can connect to when in pairing mode, and deploys the firmware wirelessly.

The key thing to emphasise here is that it only works with older firmware. Tuya patched the vulnerability in an update that came out some years ago, and indeed I’d already installed this on my smart plugs. That meant that tuya-convert could see the smart plugs, but couldn’t deploy the Tasmota firmware. So, I had to do it the hard way.

A photo of my hand holding some wires whilst flashing Tasmota onto a Tuya smart plug

Using a UART converter – the hard way

As you may have guessed from the photo above, the only way I was able to flash Tasmota onto these smart plugs was by taking one apart, and using a USB to UART converter with some jumper cables. If tuya-convert doesn’t work, then this is what you’ll need to do. You’ll need the following:

  • A USB to UART converter – I bought this one from AliExpress for the princely sum of £1.35.
  • Some Dupont Jumper cables – again, I bought these from AliExpress for £2.40. I picked up a big bag of male-male, female-female and male-female cables, but you only really need male-female cables if you want to save a few pence.
  • A computer with a USB port

I would also recommend the following:

  • Some electrical tape to hold things down
  • A USB extension cable

For the plugs that I was working with, I didn’t need a soldering iron, but some others may require it.

Disassembly and what’s inside

Firstly, it is very, very important that your smart plugs are not plugged into the mains while you do this, unless you want to burn yourself and/or your house down. We’ll be providing power via a different method, so make sure your device is not plugged in via the usual method. With my smart plugs, the positioning of the screws means it’s impossible for them to be plugged into the mains anyway.

Next, remove the screws from the plug. There were five on mine – the central one had to be removed first, and then the remaining four. Once that was done, I carefully separated the top and bottom of the housing.

The bottom part includes the high voltage AC circuitry. We’re not concerned with this and can leave it alone. What we’re interested in is the ancillary circuit board in the top part. It’s held in place by two small screws – you can remove these if you wish, but you can easily access the five pin holes that we need with the board still screwed in place.

The pin holes are as follows, with the first closest to the edge:

  • RX – data in
  • TX – data out
  • GND – ground
  • GPI00 – the pin hole that puts the smart plug into flashing mode
  • 5V – the 5 volt power input pin hole

Normally, ESP chips work at 3.3 volts, but there’s a converter chip elsewhere on the circuit board for these specific smart plug. Yours may be different, so check first to see if it’s 3.3 volts or 5 volts. The UART to USB converter that I have offers both, so we’ll use five volts for this.

Connecting the wires

Firstly, make sure your USB to UART converter is not plugged in to the computer. You’ll need to get your Dupont cables and connect them from your converter to the board. The pins on the converter should be labelled, so you need to connect them as follows:

  • From RX on the board to TXD on the converter
  • From TX on the board to RXD on the converter
  • From 5V on the board to 5V on the converter
  • From both GND and GPI00 on the board to GND on the converter

For this last one, I used three cables – two male-male cable from each of the GND and GPI00 ports on the board, and one female-male cable from the GND port on the converter – and then taped the pins at the end of the wires together. If it helps, there’s a standard wiring diagram on the Tasmota Getting Started page – although we’re connecting one additional wire (GPI00).

Getting read to flash Tasmota

Now that we’ve linked the converter to board, we can do the fun bit – flashing the device. There are several ways you can do this, of which I would recommend two:

  • Tasmotizer – this is a simple Windows program for flashing. The key advantage is that it can optionally download and backup the previous firmware, just in case you want to restore it later.
  • Tasmota Web Installer – this allows you to install Tasmota through your web browser, using WebSerial. As it stands, only desktop versions of Chrome, Edge and Opera support it, so you can’t use Firefox or Safari.

Personally, I had a better experience with the Web Installer, so this is what I used. Once you’ve opened your flashing tool, plug the USB to UART converter into your computer and then click ‘Connect’. Your browser will ask for your permission to link the web page with the COM port created by the converter, so you’ll need to grant permission.

Note: sometimes the COM port wouldn’t show for me in the browser. If this happens to you, try opening Device Manager, if using Windows, to ensure that the driver has installed correctly. If not, asking Device Manager to simply update the drivers should be enough. I had the most success if I opened the web page, connected the USB to UART converter and then clicked ‘Connect’ in that order.

If all is well, the web flasher will connect to your device, erase the existing firmware and then upload Tasmota. It’s a quick process – the binary file for Tasmota version 15 is only 655 kilobytes, so it’ll only take a couple of minutes at most.

If you get a connection error, try swapping the RX and TX cables over and then try again, and make sure that the light on the circuit board isn’t on or flashing. If the light is on, it’s a sign that you’ve not connected the GPI00 pin correctly.

Assuming that the flashing worked, you can take the jumper cables out and reassemble your device and plug it back in to the mains.

Configuring Tasmota

So, now that your device has been flashed, you need to configure Tasmota on the device. Get your phone out, and go to Wi-Fi settings. You should see a new Wi-Fi hotspot called ‘tasmota-something-something’, where the somethings are an alphanumeric string – connect to it. A hotspot login box should appear – if not, go to http://192.168.4.1/ in your phone’s web browser.

The first step is to connect Tasmota to your Wi-Fi network. Choose the network, or type it in, and provide the password. Tasmota will then connect, and, if successful, will redirect to its new IP address which it’ll display on screen. I suggest making a note of this.

You’ll now need to navigate to Tasmota’s new IP address in a web browser – you can do this on any device, not just your phone. The first thing we need to do is tell Tasmota what kind of device it has been installed on. The easiest way to do this is with a Template, and there are a huge range of templates listed here. I couldn’t find an exact match for mine, but the closest was this one, which gave me the following template code:

{"NAME":"Anoop SP15","GPIO":[0,0,0,0,56,21,0,0,0,17,0,0,0],"FLAG":0,"BASE":18}

To paste this template into Tasmota, I used this guide. From the Tasmota home screen, I clicked ‘Configuration’, then ‘Configure Other’, and pasted the whole string into the ‘Template’ field at the top. Tick the box that says ‘Activate’, and then the green Save button at the bottom. Tasmota will restart, and then you’ll find that your smart plug now works. Huzzah!

Integrating Tasmota with Home Assistant

If you want your newly Tasmotised smart plug to appear in Home Assistant, then there are a couple more steps that we need to take. Tasmota communicated with other devices using MQTT, so if you don’t already have MQTT set up in Home Assistant, you’ll need to do this. The easiest way is to install the Mosquitto addon; this will then suggest the MQTT integration for you.

Next, we need to create a user account for Tasmota to use with MQTT. In Home Assistant, open Settings, and then People. At the top, select ‘Users’, and then click the blue ‘add user’ button. Give them a username and password, and then save these details somewhere safe for the next step.

Back to Tasmota. Firstly, we need to change a setting to allow Home Assistant to automatically discover your new Tasmota device. From the Tasmota home screen, choose ‘Console’, and input the following command:

SetOption19 0

Press enter. Next, go back to the Tasmota home screen, and into ‘Configuration’ again. Select the ‘Configure MQTT’ option. In the first box, you’ll need to enter the IP address or local hostname for your Home Assistant installation. If you use Home Assistant OS, this is most likely to be ‘homeassistant.local’.

Next, we’ll need to enter the username and password for the MQTT account we created earlier. The rest of the fields can be left with their default values, unless you want to customise the name.

Back to Home Assistant. If this is your first Tasmota device, then you should receive a notification that a new Tasmota device was found, and that you need to install the Tasmota integration. Do this, and your device will now be available. If you add any further devices, these will automatically appear in the Tasmota integration once their MQTT settings have been configured.

And that’s it. You should now be able to control your devices without needing to use Tuya’s cloud services.

The super-easy way – pre-flashed Tasmota devices

If you don’t already own a suitable smart plug, but want to use Tasmota, my advice would be to buy a smart plug with Tasmota already flashed. Local Bytes sell pre-flashed Tasmota smart plugs, so you can skip the disassembly and flashing sections of this guide. Alternatively, try eBay, where these plugs can also be bought pre-flashed.

Personally, if I was in the market for a new smart plug, I would buy one that supports Zigbee or Matter. I’ve previously reviewed some Onvis Thread/Matter smart plugs, and some Meross Wi-Fi/Matter smart plugs.

That being said, I’m pleased to have been able to flash Tasmota on these smart plugs. I’m currently only using one of them, but I’ve been able to give them a new lease of life with about £5 of materials and an hour or so of my time. Indeed, the spare ones may well end up on eBay in due course for someone else to use. It’s far better than letting them become yet more e-waste.

What’s next

Last year I bought a Sonoff Wi-Fi RF Bridge, but was disappointed that it wouldn’t work the way that I expected it to. And getting it to work with Home Assistant was a bit of a pain, requiring a custom integration from HACS or an addon. I’ve already installed Tasmota on it, so it too has local control, and I’m looking at flashing the RF chip with a different custom firmware to make it more useful. That will probably require soldering and is for another future blog post, however.

A tale of two dongles

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A photo of two dongles, both Sonoff ZBDongle E devices, labelled 'Zigbee' and 'Thread'.

I now have two dongles – both Sonoff ZBDongle E devices – connected to the Raspberry Pi which runs my Home Assistant instance. One is for Zigbee, and the other one is for Thread.

Last January, I wrote about how I was using both Zigbee and Thread on the same dongle. This uses ‘multi-protocol’ mode, and requires a Home Assistant addon which can differentiate between Zigbee and Thread data packets. However, this is no longer recommended:

During the further development and testing of the multiprotocol firmware, we have concluded that while Silicon Labs’ multiprotocol works, it comes with technical limitations. These limitations mean users will not have the best experience compared to using dedicated Zigbee and Thread radios. That is why we do not recommend using this firmware, and it will remain an experimental feature of Home Assistant Yellow and Home Assistant SkyConnect. If you currently have the multiprotocol firmware installed but don’t actively use it to connect to Thread devices, we recommend that you disable multiprotocol.

For the time being, I have been operating a single ZBDongle E just with Zigbee firmware. However, now that I have some Thread devices, I decided to buy a second dongle and flash that with Thread firmware, using this web flasher.

Now, my Thread smart plugs can be reached by Home Assistant without its own Thread dongle – I have a Google Nest Wi-Fi system which also acts as Thread Border Routers. Therefore, having a Thread dongle isn’t necessary – Home Assistant can see and interact with the devices using Google Nest Wi-Fi. But having a dedicated Thread dongle for Home Assistant does offer some advantages:

  • Thread is a mesh network, so adding another Thread device extends the mesh and should improve resilience.
  • It gives Home Assistant direct access to the Thread network.
  • It enables another Thread Border Router, offering an additional exit node.
  • The Home Assistant Thread Border Router addon includes a web interface, allowing you to view your network’s topology and get a visual representation of how the devices connect to each other.

You may also notice that I’ve labelled the two dongles so that I know which one is which, using my trusty Bluetooth label printer.

If you’re looking to buy your own Sonoff ZBDongle E, you can, of course, buy one from Amazon (sponsored link), but (whispers: they’re cheaper on AliExpress).

Just a note: I was unable to flash any updated firmware on the newer dongle that I bought this month, using the Web flasher, so that’s now the Zigbee dongle. Apparently it may be an issue with the Windows drivers, as I was able to use Home Assistant’s Silabs Firmware Flasher addon to update it instead. If you specify this custom URL in the addon settings, it’ll use the latest (as of November 2024) Zigbee firmware. It’s also worth noting that, if you use Zigbee2MQTT, once you’re running the latest Zigbee firmware, you’ll need to tell Zigbee2MQTT to use the new ’ember’ driver rather than ‘ezsp’.

The older dongle seemed to happy to accept different firmware using the web flasher, having done so in the past. So, that’s the one with the Thread firmware.

Creating a Bluetooth proxy with ESPHome

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A photo of an m5stack Atom Lite which has been flashed with ESPHome firmware to act as a Bluetooth Proxy for Home Assistant

My latest Home Assistant project has been creating a Bluetooth Proxy – a device that essentially extends the range of my Raspberry Pi’s Bluetooth signal. To do this, I’ve purchased a small device with a ESP32 chip on, and flashed it with firmware from ESPHome.

Okay, so that introduction has a lot of jargon. Allow me to break it down a little.

What is a Bluetooth proxy?

Because Bluetooth connections are point-to-point, you can’t use range extenders like you can with Wifi, Zigbee and Thread networks. That means that any Bluetooth devices that you want to connect to Home Assistant need to be in range of the device that you’re running Home Assistant on. I recently moved my Raspberry Pi to a different location, which meant that it was out of range of one of my Bluetooth thermometers.

A Bluetooth proxy acts as a kind-of bridge between Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. You place the proxy device within range of the Bluetooth devices that you want to connect to Home Assistant, and connect it to your home Wi-Fi network. Once set up, Home Assistant should see your Bluetooth devices as if they were in range.

If you’re running Home Assistant Container, then a Bluetooth proxy may also be easier to set up than a USB Bluetooth dongle. Passing USB devices into a Docker image doesn’t always work well.

It’s worth noting here that Bluetooth proxies are just a Home Assistant ‘thing’. They won’t help you connect a Bluetooth speaker to, say, a smartphone that’s out of range. Also, you can’t buy a device that works as a Bluetooth proxy out of the box. Seriously, if you go onto Amazon and search for ‘Bluetooth proxy’ (sponsored link), all you will get is results for Bluetooth adaptors and development boards with ESP32 chips.

The M5Stack Atom Lite

Whilst there are lots of boards that you can buy, a good option is the M5Stack Atom Lite (also available from AliExpress, where I got mine). This is because it comes with a plastic case, and connects easily using a USB-C cable. You could buy a different board and make your own case for it, but I don’t have a lot of time right now and don’t own a 3D printer. Besides, it costs less than £10 delivered.

The device is tiny – about the size of a 50p piece, and less than a centimetre thick. Because it’s a development board, it also comes with several pins to connect to other devices, but these aren’t necessary if you’re just using it as a Bluetooth proxy. Inside, is the Espressif ESP32 chip.

There are other ESP32-based products in the M5Stack Atom range, that add (for example) a microphone or GPS chip, but again, we don’t need these for a simple Bluetooth proxy.

Installing ESPHome

ESPHome is a sister project to Home Assistant, as they’re both managed by the Open Home Foundation. It’s similar to Tasmota, which I’ve blogged about before, in that they’re both custom firmware packages that you can flash onto ESP devices. Whilst Tasmota and ESPHome can do many of the same things, if you want a Bluetooth proxy then you’ll need to use ESPHome as Tasmota doesn’t support it.

Probably the easiest way to install ESPHome is using one of the ready-made projects. These can be flashed directly from your web browser, as long as you’re using Chrome or Edge (Firefox doesn’t yet support WebSerial so won’t work). You’ll need to connect your Atom Lite to your computer using a USB-C cable that supports both data and charging. You may also need to install the USB drivers – on my Windows 10 machine, the ‘CH9102_VCP_SER_Windows’ download worked. You should then be able to install the firmware, which will take a couple of minutes. Once done, you’ll be prompted for your home Wi-Fi network name and password, and then you should be good to go. Home Assistant will hopefully detect your new Bluetooth proxy automatically.

Managing your Bluetooth proxy in ESPHome

I used ‘hopefully’ in the previous sentence, because this didn’t happen in my case. As I used Home Assistant Supervised, I was able to install the official ESPHome addon; if you use Docker, you can just run docker pull ghcr.io/esphome/esphome to install it. Once installed, the ESPHome addon/docker image should detect your Bluetooth proxy and allow you to ‘adopt’ it.

This will let you view the hostname of your Bluetooth proxy device, which will be something like ‘atom-bluetooth-proxy-wibble.local‘. You can then add the ESPHome integration to Home Assistant, specifying the hostname, and you’ll be good to go. As soon as the integration was working, Home Assistant was able to see a new Bluetooth device and allowed me to configure the integration.

Going forward, you should find that Home Assistant is able to automatically update your ESPHome devices whenever new firmware is available – this is a new feature from the 2024.07 release. But you can also use the ESPHome addon/docker image to add or change features on your device. You could, for example, allow your device to act as an iBeacon as well (I think).

One thing to bear in mind is that Bluetooth and Wi-Fi both use the same 2.4 GHz frequency band. So, if you’re comfortable building your own board with a wired Ethernet connection instead of Wi-Fi, then you may get better performance.

Fitbit-less

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A photo of a Fitbit Charge HR which is stuck on a firmware update

I’m currently without my Fitbit, as it seems to have died. It looks like a firmware update failed, leaving it basically bricked. I spent about an hour on Sunday chatting to a very helpful support agent called Ulises, and despite trying several methods to get it to reboot correctly, we weren’t able to.

Thankfully, the kind people at Fitbit offered me either a free replacement, or 30% off a new model. I decided to go for the former; though the new models are better, right now I can’t afford the 70% balance that I’d need to pay. Hopefully it’ll arrive soon.

Frustratingly, I had managed to reach my 10,000 step goal every day for the previous 57 days, up to and including Saturday. This beat a record of 32 days that I set in April last year. Reaching 10,000 steps is relatively easy on weekdays; my commute involves around 45 minutes of walking. But weekends can be a challenge, and keeping it up for so long required some forward planning.

Even though I haven’t been wearing a fitness tracker for the past couple of days, I’m still following similar habits. This includes not standing still if I can avoid it, such as waiting for a train. When at work, I still go to a set of toilets a little further away from my desk, and I try to move around at least once every hour.

Since getting my Fitbit in September 2015, I’ve lost around 9 kilos in weight. That’s almost 20 lb, or nearly 1 1/2 stone, if you use old-fashioned measurements. Whilst I am also eating better, having a Fitbit motivates me to do just a little more exercise every day, and it seems to be making a difference. It’s brought my Body-Mass Index (BMI) down to 23.3, which is well within the ‘healthy’ zone; previously, I was straying into being ‘overweight’. And whilst BMI is a very crude measurement, it’s used as a kind-of ready-reckoner by a lot of health professionals.

I’ll be looking forward to my replacement Fitbit arriving, not at least because I don’t currently have a working watch. Let’s see if I can beat my 57 day record, and manage to walk 10,000 steps for a whole two months.