Hi guys,
Complete newbie here so please be kind.
I’ve done a fair bit of googling and reading but am still I little confused.
As a straight forward question, does Home assistant work with Sonoff devices without needing to flash them with another firmware?
If so can someone point me in the direction of some details?
Thanks all.
Jon
Wow, not a single reply.
I’ll take that as a no then.
@Jonh If you searched ‘sonoff original firmware’ here you may have found
You need to be a bit patient here…it takes time for replies quite often
regards wellsy
Hi Wellsy, thanks for that. No I didn’t find that thread although I did do plenty of searching, just kept coming up with old threads of people asking for support but no resolutions.
Thanks, I’ll give it a read.
It would be good if you could let others in the same boat know if you have found what you needed by adding another post here if you have the time.
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I’ll do that yes.
I’ve got to figure out GitHub first, never used that service, looks a bit serious.
However, it isn’t really that hard to flash a third party software onto a Sonoff device, either.
You have at least two options that are both very popular here. One as you know is Tasmota. The other is ESPHome.
To flash a new firmware all you need is an FTDI adapter and four female-male “Dupont” wires. Both of which can be found fairly inexpensively on Amazon or Aliexpress.
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I have looked at flashing but the amount of conflicting instructions and incomplete instructions really puts me off. I’ve found it very difficult to find a definitive, step by step process that doesn’t assume some level of knowledge or that doesn’t start off as a beginners guide only to short cut steps later on.
When I’ve got more time over winter I’ll have a look at installing Hass on my Linux machine and see where we go from there.
Thanks
Ok, so this a “testing the waters” question and you don’t have HA actually installed yet?
For flashing instructions have you looked at the Tasmota Wiki itself?
Particularly: https://github.com/arendst/Sonoff-Tasmota/wiki/Flashing
it may look daunting but it’s actually not too bad.
Once you get to that point and if you run into troubles either post back here and I’ll see it or post another thread and I’m sure somebody here can help you out.
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Even though I spent quite a bit of time doing electronics I found flashing devices a little scary at first. Always worried you’ll brick the device
To be honest my fears were never warranted. I’ve never had a SOnOff device not flash. I’ve had momentary failures when things like I had the leads back to front or I forgot to press the button when I switched it on.
The only one that gave me trouble was an ESP32 until I discovered the default flash rate was set to some insanely high figure that 40Mbaud. I have partially bricked a few Arduino’s but that’s a different story and I recovered them all.
The SOnOffs have all flashed first time for me with custom firmware, my own firmware, Tasmota, ESPurna all worked fine.
It so common to do this that on Amazon when you buy a SOnOff you quite often find it saying “Often purchased together” with an FTDI or TTL UART dongle thing.
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No not installed yet.
I really struggle with getting time for projects, if it can’t be done start to finish in an hour it ends up taking months, so I try to get everything lined up in my head before I start.
Lots more reading to do.
Just to add… the eWeLink rubbish has never worked for me. Total waste of time, not least that’s it’s cloud based and spyware.
Well yes there is that
I wonder. For people who don’t want to, can’t, are afraid to or don’t have the time or incline to flash their SOnOff…
Is there a market to provide flashed SOnOffs are a service?
Say a SOnOff costs £10, and flashed with Tasmota one might be offered for £15. Not charging for the software, just the service.
Thinking entrepreneurial. 
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Think I actually offered the exact same thing from the buyers side some time ago, not on here I hasten to add, didn’t get any takers.
Already have a load of gear though.
I doubt there is a widespread market for it because it’s really so easy to do yourself so I think the logistics of doing something like that makes it financially infeasible.
The “flasher” wouldn’t be able to sell enough of them to be able to buy in bulk to realize any savings there. And they would then have to have a decent markup to make it worth the time of ordering, assembly, flashing, re-packaging and then shipping. Then add the cost of shipping to the end-user onto that.
And none of that takes into account that each device that gets flashed won’t end up being used in the same way so then the decision has to be made on a standardized naming routine that takes into account the desired end-use and whether you want to put Tasmota on everything or do you want ESPHome? Then if you want ESPHome do you want it to run MQTT, the API comm method or both.
And lastly, there is the issue of support. What if the person receives their nifty newly flashed Tasmotized Sonoff and “it doesn’t work” or the person just thinks it doesn’t work because since they didn’t have the ability/desire to actually dig in and flash it themselves (the arguably easy part)? They likely won’t then have the ability/desire to dig in and troubleshoot (arguably much harder) why “it doesn’t work”.
Then the person who flashed it is now the “support” contact for their “broken” device and the flasher will then have that aspect of the transaction to deal with, too.