Kelvin Nicholson's Abode

I recently purchased an Echo from Amazon, and we were contemplating how else to better integrate it with our somewhat minimalistic home. I thought it would be interesting to get it to link to a WiFi-enabled power outlet, but unfortunately they are pretty expensive in Australia.

Then I stumbled across the Sonoff devices by Itead, and learned that they were somewhat hackable via a custom firmware. Coincidentally I received the two devices on the same day my daughter was off sick, so when she had her nap, I got hacking.

The first bottleneck was discovering that the units I received did not have any headers. A little quick soldering later, and we had headers.

No headers mom :(

Now we have headers!

A few notes of warning: the $2 programmer I got from AliExpress has 3.3v and 5v, but the output is 5v. I'm glad I measured it with my multimeter, and used a random 3.3v breadboard supply instead.

In hindsight I wish I had just purchased the FTDI programmer from Itead. It looks pretty neat.

After following the rest of the Tasmoto hardware instructions, and then the PlatformIO instructions, I was able to successfully flash both my units with the custom firmware.

I then created a Lambda function that sends a signal to CloudMQTT, and connected the two devices.

Voila!