Schinckel.net

I have a few of the Sonoff Basic devices. I’d flashed one of them with a custom firmware before, but then was using the stock firmware, and having them operate in LAN mode.

However, that’s less than awesome: for one, it means I need to have (and maintain) a custom service running somewhere on my network, and because of the way you need to provision them, it’s hard to move this to a different machine.

With ESPhome, I’ve started re-flashing my old ESP8266 devices, so I had a go at some of the Sonoff. Neither of the ones I had installed (with the stock firwmare) had headers soldered onto the UART pins, but it turned out that one of my USB-UART devices had the pins in the correct order that I was able to (after disconnecting it from the mains, of course), hold the button down, press the USB-UART device into position, and then connect the USB port. After a couple of seconds, I released the button, and, eventually (after a couple of tries), have the device in “flash” mode.

Of course, I only discovered this after totally disconnecting one, soldering on some header pins and then connecting the device using hookup wires.

Then I uploaded the custom firmware. At which point I was able to re-upload firmware using the OTA mode, which means I no longer had to juggle the serial connector, USB and GPIO0 button.

So, I then flashed another one, this time without having to solder, and had both of them configured as devices on my IoT network.

But, there was a problem. They would only connect to the Wifi when they were connected to the serial connector. When I disconnected the serial port, and reconnected them to the mains supply, they would operate correctly, but would not connect to Wifi. Even though one of them was literally less than a metre from the router.

I did a bit of research, and there apparently are a batch that are like this. Tasmota firmware has issues that mention this on GitHub, but then in those issues they are marked as “resolved”. Unfortunately there was not really a good resolution - more than likely it was just some type of stale-bot just closing issues that had not been updated in a certain time frame. At least one of these suggested that a newer firmware worked, but that was no good for me.

A couple of these issues identified that there was a missing capacitor, but one of them mentioned that they had soldered together the 3v3 supply, and the RX and TX pins.

So, I ran some experiments. Connecting the 3v3 pin to either of those other pins had no effect, but connecting the RX and TX together suddenly allowed my device with the header pins to connect!

Luckily, these pins are adjacent, so I found a jumper (I remember when these were on just about every hard drive, but I couldn’t find one today with a single pin), and hooked it up.

All good!

Unfortunately, when putting it back together I didn’t align the top cover with the button correctly, so I managed to break that. Which just means I can’t control the switch directly, only remotely. That’s pretty annoying (it’s one of the reasons I went with Sonoff over some other solutions), but at least it works on HomeKit now.