General area when it fits no where else

Moderator: Mmiscool

User avatar
By NDE
#39483 been looking at these for the past few days as I building something on the very same lines but into a wall socket. but with the cost of these there is no point in making my own, the parts come to more!!

So just ordered 4 of them to see how they go. no point in ordering one as then the post is more than it costs.

~Just remember don't try and flash them while connected to the mains, it looks like there is no electrical isolation from the mains side. I expect it's got a simple switching down converter like a lot of the LED lights now days. but the 5 volts could be five volts above neutral or 5 volts below line and one of them is going to bite. :o

Just got to sit back and wait for them to arrive.

Last attempt was to rip out the wireless side of a 433MHz controlled socket and fitted a 8266-1 in its place with a few transistors to invert the switch control. got a bit hot as the old rf bit did not draw as much current as the esp's do. but it did prove i could turn the Christmas window lights on and off from my phone and laptop. :D


Neil
User avatar
By Jokkepappa
#39553 Just to remind. You ALWAYS want to control live with the relay. Preferably both live and neutral.

If you can be sure which cable is live, this module is great as it is. (Like if you live in countries like GB where you can only put sucket one ways or if you put it in the walls/electical cabinet where you know what the live cable is). For normal Schuko plugs, i would add two relays (or one relay that has 2 switching contacts) to controlled by the module to control the mains.

On the pictures from the seller's site the top most via on lower picture (going directly from screw terminal to another) is ment for neutral and the other one going through relay for live.
Image

(on standardized countries brown cable is live and blue neutral. To be sure check with voltage detection pen)

Just stay safe when you mess with mains voltages. On some countries it's not allowed for normal folk to do much more than change lightbulb without proper education and papers. So if something happens insurance might not cover it.
User avatar
By JMS
#42056 I just bought 4 of the Sonoff devices. I was able to get them flashed with the nodeMCU firmware but not basic. The basic flasher appears to work but after reboot of the esp I get nothing. If i remember correctly ESPBasic should output the version number to serial on boot. It does output some bytes on reboot but it's just garbage characters. It outputs a few bytes immediately then after two seconds or so it outputs a few more. Any thoughts?
User avatar
By JMS
#42058 Ok... after a few tries I was able to get it to come up In AP mode but cannot get it to connect in station mode.

Update:
Looks like a reboot of my wireless AP fixed the problem of the device connecting as client.

It appears that the unpopulated header does not connect directly to any of the ESP pins. The only pins with easy access are: +vcc, gnd, TX, RX and a little less easy: gpio 0 (switch), gpio 12(relay), and GPIO 13 (LED) which is attached to the push button.

For firmware uploading I powered the ESP with a 3.3v power supply and used a 5v TTL serial adapter with out any level shifting it does in fact appear that the ESPs RX pin is 5v tolerant.
Last edited by JMS on Mon Feb 29, 2016 8:24 am, edited 1 time in total.