I missed the old days where those Tuya smart plugs can be wirelessly flashed with Tasmota/ESPHome, but it’s been long gone since Tuya updated their encryption algorithm. Ongoing work can be found here.
So, does anyone know any ESPHome-friendly smart plugs nowadays available in US? Thanks!
Localbytes. They’ve been very reliable for me.
Athom, not so much
And for me
I just bought and flashed a Sonoff S31 smart switch with ESPHome. If you’re comfortable with cracking it open and hooking up a serial adapter to do the initial flash, it’s a great little plug. Does power monitoring too as a bonus.
Is the case damaged when you crack it open?
Nope, not at all. You pop the end cap off with a spudger or something (I used a guitar pick style tool I had), slide two strips out to expose the case screws, remove those and slide the guts out. Really easy-peasy. And there are lots of good guides online for these outlets.
I have had good experiences with Athom devices. You can buy them with ESPHome already flashed.
Tuya has begun manufacturing Wi-Fi modules using a Realtek RTL8710BN Wi-Fi SOC instead of an ESP82xx chip. Neither ESPHome nor Tasmota can run on Realtek devices and I am unaware of any plans on supporting them.
You can flash the Realtek chip with a Tasmota-like UI, but it is not Tasmota. Here is a forum post that may help.
Here is how I flashed OpenBK on a Kuled switch that uses the Realtek chip.
https://www.elektroda.com/rtvforum/viewtopic.php?p=20355154#20355154
Hope this helps.
Thanks for the info. I do have a lot of unflashable Tuya devices that use Non-ESP chip, and I love using them in non-critical applications like vent fan. But I’m too busy at work to invest into new technologies, so I’ll probably just stay with what I used before. I feel sad for getting old.
Define “a lot”. Where are you located? I may be able to offer assistance flashing your devices.
Nothing to do with it. The Realtek chips are cheaper than the ESP chips. If you make a million devices and save 10-cents per device, then you have just added $100K to the bottom line. DIY tinkerers like us aren’t even on their radar.
Thanks @stevemann! I have around 9 Tuya smart plugs and I’m located in US. Some of them bought in 2019 were definitely using ESP8266 but I’m not very sure about those bought in 2021 and 2022. I just saw from online comments that they are using RLT chips.
If it has an ESP chip, it should be flashable.
I find them to be listed as supported by LibreTiny so they actually do work with the esphome fork 
The support was just merged last week into dev so it is expected to land in the next stable official esphome release 
ESPHome? RTLHome? BKHome? What’s next? 
Jumping in to mention that I’ve also been using S31s for some time with great luck. They somewhat frequently have good sales on Amazon so I tend to just keep them in my ‘wishlist’ and grab them when they’re on-sale. Never had an issue with them. Obviously takes a little time to open them up and flash, but it’s quite straightforward.
Just checked and the 2-pack is currently on-sale.
That’s great news. But still, these Tuya plugs cannot be (easily and reliably) flashed wirelessly without cracking the case 
That’s what cloudcutter is for, to make the removal of the Tuya firmware easy and reliable.
I used this process from Digiblur and just copied the comands and it worked first time, so far have done 5 devices.
if your tuya plugs firmware version is not listed here, there’s a good chance you can use cloudcutter to
flash it ota
Can’t be much easier - esp based devices hardly offered OTA flashing recently 
Has anyone successfully got a 3-way switch working with HA using tuya-cloudcutter and ESPHome/LibreTiny? There is a Treatlife SS02 and a UltraPro Smart Switch listed in the supported devices
It had taken me a long time to figure this out with Tasmota which is why I ask.
Thanks
