Sonoff
ITEAD from Shenzhen China have been around For a While now And their Sonoff range Of control devices are Not only cheap but actually pretty good. When you look at the Sonoff Basic, which Is essentially a power supply, ESP8266 And a relay Then you have a neat wifi switch In a small package. If you actually add up the cost Of the components its hard To make one For the price Of these units but that's the china effect I guess. Anyway, since the 'basic' ITEAD now have a comprehensive range of Sonoff devices, from the Basic, the Dual and the 4 Channel to the elegant touch wall switches and we'd be crazy not to want to hook these up to our HA system.
Out of the box the Sonoff device comes with custom firmware that requires an 'app', Internet access and a service that's hosted in China. Whilst this is ok for some, being able to link these directly to our Homeseer is a preferred option. I have now received, flashed and integrated every Sonoff variant and all work just fine which is nice.
Tasmota
Developed by Theo Arends, the Tasmota firmware runs on the ESP8266 And connects your Sonoff devices to MQTT. The firmware Is GPL And full source Is available for those (Like me) who want to tinker with it to support other devices quickly and easily such as NodeMCU. Flashing your Sonoff device depends on which device but most can be flashed 'over the air' using SonOTA but others require a direct connection to the conveniently placed programming connections. Personally, even though I've used SonOTA, I still prefer the hard wired approach. I won't go over the flashing process here because there are enough guides on the Web covering this.
MQTT
Back in 1999 IBM came up with MQ Telemetry Transport Protocol to allow for lightweight communication between devices such as sensors in a queue-able and reliable manner. Since then its been developing and is now an accepted standard at version 3.1.1. MQTT is a service provided by a Broker such as Mosquitto which is open source, multi-platform and very stable but there are many more and the choice is very much yours. You'll need to install and test a MQTT broker on your local network in order to make any of this work.
The premise of MQTT is simple; There are publishers (devices that send information) and subscribers (devices that listen for information). Devices can be both publishers and subscribers and this is often the way it works out.
Considerations
MQTT like many things is CaSe SeNsItIve which means that Sonoff is not the same as sonoff and POWER1 is not the same as power1 or Power1. If you get this wrong it just won't work so check your device names carefully. The links below for device creation also gives a table of output names at the time of writing but the general rule is that outputs are named POWER if there's a single output or POWER1, POWER2 etc if there's more than one.
Because of the way MQTT works its entirely possible that when the plug-in loads it will initially receive queued publishes from the broker. This means that you may see historic data from devices that may no longer be on the network - don't worry the plug-in will soon update the status correctly within the first minute or two.
Links
General Information is available at https://www.gen.net.uk/sonoff-homeseer
Device Creation is available at https://www.gen.net.uk/hs3-creating-devices
The BugTracker for Reporting Issues is available at https://mantis.gen.net.uk/project_pa...?project_id=24
When reporting bugs and issues please include a full description of the issue, a logfile and any screenshots etc that will help us to track down the issue and resolve it.
ITEAD from Shenzhen China have been around For a While now And their Sonoff range Of control devices are Not only cheap but actually pretty good. When you look at the Sonoff Basic, which Is essentially a power supply, ESP8266 And a relay Then you have a neat wifi switch In a small package. If you actually add up the cost Of the components its hard To make one For the price Of these units but that's the china effect I guess. Anyway, since the 'basic' ITEAD now have a comprehensive range of Sonoff devices, from the Basic, the Dual and the 4 Channel to the elegant touch wall switches and we'd be crazy not to want to hook these up to our HA system.
Out of the box the Sonoff device comes with custom firmware that requires an 'app', Internet access and a service that's hosted in China. Whilst this is ok for some, being able to link these directly to our Homeseer is a preferred option. I have now received, flashed and integrated every Sonoff variant and all work just fine which is nice.
Tasmota
Developed by Theo Arends, the Tasmota firmware runs on the ESP8266 And connects your Sonoff devices to MQTT. The firmware Is GPL And full source Is available for those (Like me) who want to tinker with it to support other devices quickly and easily such as NodeMCU. Flashing your Sonoff device depends on which device but most can be flashed 'over the air' using SonOTA but others require a direct connection to the conveniently placed programming connections. Personally, even though I've used SonOTA, I still prefer the hard wired approach. I won't go over the flashing process here because there are enough guides on the Web covering this.
MQTT
Back in 1999 IBM came up with MQ Telemetry Transport Protocol to allow for lightweight communication between devices such as sensors in a queue-able and reliable manner. Since then its been developing and is now an accepted standard at version 3.1.1. MQTT is a service provided by a Broker such as Mosquitto which is open source, multi-platform and very stable but there are many more and the choice is very much yours. You'll need to install and test a MQTT broker on your local network in order to make any of this work.
The premise of MQTT is simple; There are publishers (devices that send information) and subscribers (devices that listen for information). Devices can be both publishers and subscribers and this is often the way it works out.
Considerations
MQTT like many things is CaSe SeNsItIve which means that Sonoff is not the same as sonoff and POWER1 is not the same as power1 or Power1. If you get this wrong it just won't work so check your device names carefully. The links below for device creation also gives a table of output names at the time of writing but the general rule is that outputs are named POWER if there's a single output or POWER1, POWER2 etc if there's more than one.
Because of the way MQTT works its entirely possible that when the plug-in loads it will initially receive queued publishes from the broker. This means that you may see historic data from devices that may no longer be on the network - don't worry the plug-in will soon update the status correctly within the first minute or two.
Links
General Information is available at https://www.gen.net.uk/sonoff-homeseer
Device Creation is available at https://www.gen.net.uk/hs3-creating-devices
The BugTracker for Reporting Issues is available at https://mantis.gen.net.uk/project_pa...?project_id=24
When reporting bugs and issues please include a full description of the issue, a logfile and any screenshots etc that will help us to track down the issue and resolve it.