I’m having a heck of a time getting any Sonoff device to program via an FTDI interface. I can program a Sonoff SV device with zero issues but when I crack open other Sonoff devices such as the fan controller or NSPanel I can never get any connection to it, ESPHome Web can never connect and I’m using the exact same FTDI Interface each time (Adafruit model).
I’ve held down the button (or for NSPanel shorted the ground to the GPIO pin as seen in the video), I’ve reversed TX and RX more times than I can count and no joy. Ever.
I thought perhaps it was my USB cable or wiring but, again, I throw on the SV and it has zero problems every time.
Are there any good tips on how I might diagnose what could be going wrong? At this point I’ve spent 4 hours today trying to get the two above device to take ESPHome and I’m beyond frustrated so I decided unless I can try something new there’s no sense in pursuing any more Sonoff devices because this should have taken 5 minutes not 4 hours LOL.
If these devices allow OTA upgrades you can create the file as a .bin in esphome and upload it to the device. You really need to know the file is working though as any mistake and it could be game over if it doesn’t boot after flashing.
That would make me nervous unless I was updating something that I already had a known working config for, plus these devices didn’t have that to my knowledge anyway. Thank you for the advice.
How so? ESP’s are one of the few devices which are actually un-brick-able.
Even if you upload a broken binary you can still enter the flash mode and upload a working binary - but anyway it never happened to me that esphome produced a non working binary
I’m sure you checked for the correct voltage - typical 3.3V? It also happens that for some devices the FTDI provided power is just not enough - external correct power source with shared ground pins is necessary in that case.
You only need to “reverse” it one time so that TX connects to RX and RX to TX
Most esp modules with a onboard led actually so a successful boot into the flash mode.
Also you can just be sure to have the correct wiring to your serial adapter just by reading out boot logs (without trying entering flash mode etc.).
I didn’t mean it that way, I meant that I have tried reversing the cables in case the boards TX and RX are flipped, I’ve read some boards are backwards labeled.
I haven’t taken a voltmeter to that (but will), however it does still power the Sonoff SV properly and that is 3.3v, but this is good advice just for covering all bases.
I’ve been looking for that because I thought the same thing but neither of these seem to have an LED that I can see.
