Can I flash Wifi plug with ESPhome without flashing Tasmota first?

I have a couple of Tuya (Nedis) outdoor wifi plugs. I flashed the first one with tasmota, the migrated to ESPhome.
But for the other one, I thought I could go straight to ESPhome. But I can’t find any information on the “setting up a temporary AP, reset the plug and enter config mode”.

So, is it possible to flash an out-of-the box plug with ESPhome firmware without going via tuya-convert?

You can use tuya-convert to flash direct to esphome.

Yeah, but can I use the ESPhome add-on to flash the plug directly without gonig via tuya-convert?

I’d like to skip the part where I boot up a Pi with raspbian on just to flash.
IF it’s possible to do straight from the addon, it would be great.

Yes if you wire it via an ftdi.

You need an FTDI, which is a serial-to-USB converter. They are cheap on Amazon. You plug it into the computer, then connect TX to RX, RX to TX, and 5V and ground. This little board basically does the job of the USB driver on boards like the NodeMCU or Wemos D1. All you need to do is find the 4 communication pins on the board you want to flash.

The problem of course is finding the pins on a wifi plug that you probably cannot even open without breaking it. That is why tuya-convert is so good, no need for all that.

Worth booting your pi for.

I have tuya convert on my home assistant nuc which is always booted anyway. Stop turning your pi off and you won’t have to wait for it to boot :slight_smile:

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…how sweet would a Tuya-Convert add-on be for Home Assistant, all nicely integrated for our de-clouding tasks :thinking: Better yet, incorporated into the ESPhome add-on. Now I’m dreaming! :joy:

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Actually, that’s what I thought already worked (the no cable solution like tuya-convert). :sunglasses:
But I’m really new to the ESP-world, and realize now that I got it wrong.

And no, it’s not a problem just switching SD-card and starting up the Pi to run tuya-convert. It works great and is really easy. But even if it’s no problem, I like to try and see if it can be done even smoother.

Isn’t that what automation is all about? :slight_smile:

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You can flash ESPhome straight to a device without going to Tasmota as Nick said. Personally I’ve never used Tasmota yet and I have heaps of ESPhome devices with about 13 of them having been flashed using Tuya-Convert.

I think it’s not possible to skip the “Tuya-convert” part. But you can just flash the ESPhome-file with “Tuya-convert” So you don’t have to use tasmota first.

You just have to compile the ESPHome bin-file and download it. Then you have to copy it to the /files/ folder of tuya-convert. After that you can just start the tuya-convert and select the ESP-Home firmware.

Sorry for the bad english. I hope you understand it :slight_smile:

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So you have no other computer?

Hi!

I run Home Assistant on a NUC with Debian. Tuya-convert seems to use dnsmasq and something more (can’t remeber) which means I can’t run that on the NUC with Home Assistant running since I run add-ons that cause conflicting ports. I think it was ADGuard and …maybe Mosquitto (?) .

I also have a Pi 3+ with a second HA-instance, mostly used for testing sensors and stuff. It is installed with HassOS and I don’t want to re-install it.

So I just boot the Pi with another card with Raspbian, flash the plugs (with a ESPhome-firmware), change back card, reboot. And while the Pi boots up, my main HA’s ESPhome integration just found a new switch to configure.

So it’s really no hassle . It’s not like I flash new plugs daily :slight_smile:
I just started this thread because thought I could flash the plugs over WiFi from ESPhome even the first time, not using tuya-convert at all.

And now I know I can’t.

I run tuya-convert through docker on my ubuntu nuc.

Hi. This is probably the wrong thread, but I have just flashed a plug with esphome directly through tuya-convert. I wish I had configured the firmware differently though, is there any way to reflash a new firmware through the same process with tuya-convert? I am not able to set the plug in smartconfig anymore, so the script fails at this step.

If it is no longer running tuya firmware then you can’t flash with tuya-convert. esphome has OTA though.

That makes sense I suppose. So basically I need to figure out how to connect to my plug now through esphome and send an OTA there. Thanks! Not exatly sure how, but I’ll find a better place to get help for that :wink:

What are you seeing in the esphome ui when you click logs?

I haven’t used the esphome ui. I created the firmware with esphome docker image. I think I have understood what I need to do now, but my last problem I don’t think I can solve is that I deleted the config for the firmware, so I have lost the random ota oassword I set. I am also unable to recover the file through different means (diskdrill, photorec). With the password I think I know how to proceed, but no luck there

Well that is … unfortunate. Why would you do that?

By the way you can still get logs from the command line.