Localbytes plug preflashed with Esphome

ESPHome
1

I have purchased a Localbytes plug preflashed with Tasmota and Esphome. I have experience of those just flashed with Tasmota and this has behaved in a very similar way i.e. when I plugged it in, it transmitted a wifi connection which I connected to and this opened the standard Tasmota wifi connection page. I entered my home wifi credentials and this connected, creating a IP address for Tasmota connection.

So I understand how to use this as a Tasmota plug. However, I cannot work out how preflashed Esphome works with this. I want to use Esphome but am used to the concept of connecting an ESP32 device to my laptop and using the usb connection to install minimal ESPHome. Then obviously, I can create Esphome Yaml in Home Asiistant, possibly wirelessly updating.

This is preflashed so now that it has an ip address, do I simply update wirelessly from Home Assistant ESPHome and, if so, with what yaml to support the plug? Any ideas?

2

Yes, as simple as that.
You’ll need to configure the yaml based on tasmota template pinout.

But tasmota starting v12 has different partition system that’s not compatible for esphome ota (indicated by safeboot partition in the settings).

There’s a workaround for that Read/Write bootloader, partition table and any partition via OTA by angelnu · Pull Request #5535 · esphome/esphome · GitHub

3

You only need to “adopt” the discovered esphome node in the esphome dashboard then you can make changes to your node.

4

Ok. Still not fully understanding this. I must admit, I thought that, when purchasing these, there would be fully functional plug supporting yaml installed.

As it is, it seems I can only access Tasmota for the initial setup. Adopting, as I understand from my own experience, requires one of 2 things:

  1. The device is already set up with useable yaml and thus appears in the “Discovered” section of Integrations, and can then be added to ESPHome using the configure button.
  2. You can directly add the device within ESPHome on the Integration page by entering the host ip address and pressing Submit. This however requires yaml to be installed already.

For a new plug, neither of these is true.

As regards useable yaml for this type of plug, I amnot sure about using the tasmota template pinout or indeed having to deal with the partitions. I see there is the github https://github.com/JamesSwift/localbytes-plug-pm.git project that flashes esphome onto the tasmota LocalBytes plug and this has yaml code. But that seems like flashing esphome onto a device with esphome pre-installed just so that you can use esphome!? I do not want to brick these devices (I already have a major issue I am dealing with regarding bricked Localbytes plugs after a botched ubiquiti network installation so don’t want to add these plugs to that serial flashing nightmare).

Is it actually just the case that Esphome on a plug is not usable straight out of the box or have I totally misunderstood (note: I realise that will most likely be the case).

5

Have you bought Esphome ones or Tasmota ones ?

6

Thanks for the very simple question as it made me look at my order confirmation. I was going to say Esphome as that is what I wished to purchase. However:

Power Monitoring Smart Plug - Preflashed & Preconfigured Ă— 4
UK - Type G / Tasmota

Hmmmm… the OP is an idiot! I clearly have made a mistake and now everything makes sense. Sorry for wasting everyones time. I guess I will be looking at https://github.com/JamesSwift/localbytes-plug-pm.git after all

1 Like
7

Ah makes sense. You’ll have to compile a minimal esphome firmware, flash that using tasmota interface, then once up and running on esphome, upload the full esphome config

EDIT, the instructions in the about site explains it, good luck