I currently have a Sonoff WiFi to 433 MHz hub I modified and downloaded new firmware to. It’s working fine but I had a scare the other day that I thought it broke (it’s fine now, lost power to outlet). So my concern is to start to get a backup to it, preferably one that’s easier to configure/autodiscoverable - however, i doubt that due to the way the sensors work. I have a bunch of 433MHz door alarm sensors and flood sensors on it. They were cheap, they work and are reliable. However, if I lose that hub I don’t think those are easy to get anymore.
I HAS to be WiFi/Ethernet and not a USB plugin because I’m using a VM home assistant and it just doesn’t ever play nice with USB passthru.
Alternatively, there is a custom component that can be added to ESPHome if you don’t want to use MQTT, need both receive and transmit, or just prefer ESPHome. However, I don’t have any direct experience with the custom component.
The black one is impossible to find anywhere, but the white one can still be bought.
The white one can not be flashed with Portisch, but it might not be needed either. It depends on the devices you use.
If the devices is using a protocol that is not understood by the white Sonoff, then it can be set up to not handle the signal interpretation on the device, but send it all raw to HA, which can then handle it instead.
The Sonoff RF bridge is pretty cheap, so if you can spare the few bucks for it, then buy one and test it.
I keep getting errors “Failed to initialize. Try resetting your device or holding the BOOT button while clicking INSTALL.” but there’s zero information I can find about any “boot” button on them. Except the only button I can find is the “RST” button which seems to just reboot it.
Its also immensely vague which of the huge list of devices (that seems to be randomly-sorted) on the OpenMQTTGateway site to pick, I assume it’d be the Lilygo-rtl_433 since I want to decode stuff that is in the rtl_433 libraries but there’s no information and the few things I’ve guessed at all give the same error.
Getting very frustrated - any tips or should I return it and shell out for more Raspberry Pis and actual RTL-SDR dongles that work easily?
I don’t remember having to do anything extra, but you could try pulling GPIO 0 low by connecting it to a ground pin… that’s usually all the BOOT button does on ESP32 devices.
I used the Upload from the Web option with lilygo-rtl_433 chosen in the dropdown.
Ok, I just tried it shorting IO0 to Ground…and it looks like its in bootloader mode (LCD stays blank on power-up) but still no dice. I immediately get this message when hitting the install button.
Serial is clearly working though because whatever firmware it came with if I hit reset I can watch the console scroll.
Maybe I need to learn how to do it from a command line, I know the whole web-serial stuff is buggy as hell from trying to play with Meshtastic and ESPHome stuff. So much more reliable to just use a terminal than having the extra intermediate impossible to debug layers.
Update - FINALLY got it to work…apparently had to use Windows (specifically Windows 10) with Edge (not Chrome) and a USB3.0 port (yea even tho its a USB2.0 device) while shorting IO0 to GND.
