AtHom AR01 IR sensor - help needed

[madbrain]

I have been Googling, without success so far. I was assured in another thread in the Hardware forum that all the help I could need would be available in this forum

IR receivers in multiple rooms? IR triggers

I have a need to control some smart devices (such as Z-wave smart switches, but also Wifi and other devices already linked in my HAOS) with an infrared remote, in 4 different rooms. Unfortunately, an IR to Z-Wave or IR to Wifi bridge device does not exist. What exists is an USB infrared receivers such as those from FLIRC (I own a couple of them). FLIRC integrates fine with HAOS as a keyboard remote, reportedly (though I haven’t tried it yet). If I only needed to receive IR from a single room,…

I managed to do what I wanted with a Pi + FLIRC, but this is an oversized solution that I didn’t want to repeat for 4 rooms.

I created the initial configuration, and tried to flash it as is. However, ESPHome expects the hostname of the device to be in the “.local” domain (ie. mDNS hostname). But the IR01 out of the box with Tasmota firmware doesn’t do mDNS, unfortunately. I tried to put the hostname like this in athom-ir01.yaml

esphome:
  name: tasmota-f996eb-5867

But that didn’t work due to tasmota-f996eb-5867.local not resolving .

It looks to me like I’m supposed to do the initial flash with USB (with the “prepare for first use” page I’m having issue with), and then only subsequently I can do flash wirelessly.