After an extensive reading in the forum, I see there are mixed opinions about the original sonoff bridge being attached to Home assistant using a WiFi to Serial link.
As I already have one laying around, it would be great to use it, but I too want to avoid the wifi, as it’s not unheard of that one of the mesh repeaters stops working properly, with devices still connected to it.
I understand the bridge is based on the EFR32MG21, and technically, it should be possible to attach the chip directly to a USB to Serial adapte, but I can’t find any tutorials describing this. Can anyone point out to where this has been sucessefully done? Thanks!
Well I figured this one out. I have set up the original Sonoff Bridge using the TCP IP bridge tutorial as instructed here, which involves flashing the ESP8266 and the SM-011 V1.0 module.
Next, I tested functionality. Once all was working, I have permanently reset the ESP8266 by grounding the pin labbeled F_RST on the board. The ETX and ERX pins were routed to a USB serial converter and the USB Serial (A cheap EP-01 programmer) routed to the microUSB pins on board the sonoff bridge.
On the home assistant, the setup is instructed to use the respective USB port. It seems to be self healing too. If I remove the cable, I get an error on the log, but a while after it’s reconnected, it resumes operation again.
The lights no longer work, presumably they are driven by the ESP8266.
So there we have, a winter project
Possibly, the SM-011 V1.0 module alone could also be used for such purpose!
