Does anyone have a teardown video or instructions on how to remove the shell from the square Athom AU plugs? Would be curious to crack open the ones that have failed here and see if I can see any obvious damaged components.
Can’t recall exactly but I think I’ve cracked the seal with a vice grip wrench then pried them apart with pry tools / flathead screwdriver. Just direct your frustration at them and they will yield;)
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One out of three of my UK V3 plugs has failed less than 6 months in. Stopped Wi-Fi transmitting wouldn’t connect to my Wi-Fi and no captive portal, suspect the ESP32 Wi-Fi has broken. Had stupid conversations with Athom support trying to get me to reflash with a dead Wi-Fi! I have given up with them, and resorted to cutting the case open just to see. The ESP module really is tiny in these things, may have a play if I get chance.
Won’t buy any more, shame really, bought a localbytes one, it’s ok but I preferred the sensor in the Athom one, seemed more stable.
The Athom plugs look similar to the Arlec ones which I have pulled apart. I have a stainless scraper which uses razor blades. This means I can gently hammer the blade into the seam. After that I use a 25mm paint scraper go gently lever it apart. Have done it to 3 plugs with no damage and super glued back together after flashing.
What typically goes bad in small plugs is the power supply - particularly an electrolytic capacitor on the output side of the supply. They have to work really hard, in a hot environment and die prematurely (well, ideally if you’re the manufacturer and the warranty has just expired).
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I have a couple of the V3 AU relay plugs, no actual failures so far, but one has stopped accepting flash updates. It still works, but I can’t change the firmware. Athom select Arduino in their configs, and I didn’t change that when modifying the YAML, but after removing some unneeded items from the YAML and adding a couple of others it flashed but now fails on any re-flash attempts. I suspect an Arduino problem and will switch to ESP-IDF on any subsequent ones.
Athom were not much help - suggested serial flashing but confirmed that it is not possible to open the case without damaging it.
Any error messsage to share? Also I had success activating the safe mode before running OTA on some picky devices 
The safe mode button doesn’t put it into safe mode (just reboots into normal mode.)
The error messages are along the lines of “Flash read error” aka 3, and track back to a couple of tests in the Arduino code where it checks the partition and should activate it - there are two calls but if either fails it returns the read error (3).
I have not yet tried getting into safe mode by multiple power cycles.
On further investigation I believe the flash memory has failed - I cannot get it into safe mode either by the button or power-cycling, and none of the preferences are being saved to flash, and there are sometimes error messages in the log related to this:
Error saving 4 preferences to flash. Last error=ESP_ERR_NVS_INVALID_STATE for key=294834382
I also flashed the same firmware to another ESP32-C3 and it behaves as expected.
Accordingly I have asked Athom for a replacement.
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And after a little back-and-forth Athom is indeed sending a replacement.
I will say that the response time for my questions from Athom was excellent - it was a real-time discussion via email.
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I purchased several smart plugs (esp32-c3 v3 eu) from athom and I’m not very impressed.
first one I plugged in made my earth leakage circuit breaker trip.
second one flashes blue but doesn’t broadcast an ap to connect too.
the others are reachable and I managed to flash them with the firmware provided by athom on their github.
flashing was successful, but now I can’t flash them again, nor through esphome in HA, nor through a bin file via the web server of the device.
always getting an error at the end.
I opened up the faulty one and found out there is an earth wire connecting both sides of the device that was pinched and touching components, shorting the earth pin and line.
I have reached out to athom, informing them about the issues and they responded the same day asking for pictures of the faulty device.
I provided a picture of my multimeter connected to the pins of the plug showing 3.36 ohm between earth and line and they agreed to send me two new devices.
but they didn’t give me an answer to the issue why I can’t flash them again…
I then tried to flash the disassembled plug via serial, but never succeeded, not sure what I’m doing wrong here, it’s not the first time I flash devices through serial tho.
the 3.3V, GND, RXD, TXD, RST and GPIO9 pins are exposed where I soldered wires to, connecting the esp to an FTDI USB adapter.
it seems I’m not able to get the esp into flash mode by connecting the RST and/or GPIO9 to GND when powering up.
anyone an idea?
update:
found the issue, the lead between gpio9 and gnd was broken.
I successfully flashed the firmware and am now able to update the firmware OTA.
this unfortunately means I have to open all the plugs to get them flashed via serial, something I didn’t want to do anymore as it’s almost impossible to open the case without damage, that’s why I went for devices pre flashed for esphome in the first place… sigh.
I bought 8 of the AU version in February 2023.
Within 6 months 4 of them died (no LEDs/power) and they refused to replace them, so I bought 4 more to replace them (since there does not seem to be any viable alternatives)
Then over the last 30 days, 6 more of them all died in exactly the same way. For 2 out of the 6 that died, I think there was some sort of brown out because my UPS registered a very brief (1 second) power disruption at the time that those 2 stopped working.
The other 4 all just stopped working a random number of days apart
One of them I was just using my computer 15 mins ago and everything plugged into it turned off (was not doing anything intensive - load at 220w), checked the plug and dead as a doornail. No LEDs/won’t power back on.
These were all V2’s.
I’m at a loss as to what to do next. I don’t want to give this company any more money but I rely on the data from these for a bunch of automations/power bill tracking.
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I’m afraid they are all crap.
I had some older tuya smart plugs lying around I don’t use anymore but had they a beken chip, not an esp.
They are fairly easy to open and the components are of good quality.
Luckily the footprint of the chip is the same for the esp and beken chips, so swapping them out was easy, only some GPIO pins where different but that was an easy fix in code, had to flash them anyway.
They do work as expected, but now and then, they turn off and back on for a split second and I don’t know why, not very healthy for the device plugged into it.
I stopped using them as they’re not reliable.
So best thing to do is to cut your losses and move on and never buy anything from them anymore.
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At one point I was contemplating if you could house a shelly in a double adapter.
It wouldn’t be certified of course.
I just dropped a whole stack of them into the e-waste collection bag at our local tip. Every single one I’d bought has died. Perhaps a dozen.
I did buy two of the newer power measurement units (no internal switch/relay). One is in action, the other still in its box.
@wattmatters Is the only difference with those ones that you can’t switch them on/off remotely?
Yes, they are the exact same form factor but all they do is measure power/energy, no switching function. They even have the same button on the side, which does nothing.
I put one on the power supply to a plug-in car charger (pulls ~1.8 kW) so it’s a solid test. It’s been working OK but only a couple of months so far with 110 kWh having gone through it.
I control the charging start and stop via the car (using Home Assistant automations).
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so my relays keep sticking and I have to bash the pack to get them to unstick just wondering if anyone know a good swapin replacement upgrade ?
what are people considering a failure ?
to me a failure is fried circuit board / no connection
switch not working to me is not a failure just wear n tear
I used my reflow heat gun ~ 250 deg to soften it and pried in , looks like the bottom is the way to go I have a feeling they might be pushing something down into the prongs to push the units apart as I did not really notice any glue or clips just press fitted