0Updating cheap SmartPlugs

Published by & filed under SmartHome & IoT.

I have pre­vi­ously writ­ten about modi­fy­ing cheap £10 smart­plugs to run open source firm­ware. Now I have quite a num­ber of them I needed an effi­cient way to update them. In this art­icle I doc­u­ment how to do

I have a range of Smart Plugs but they’re all based on the ESP8266 chip and all have at some point been flashed to the tas­mota firm­ware provided by Theo Aren­ds. How­ever, many of them were run­ning a very old ver­sion and I wanted to update it for secur­ity reas­ons. This proved to be a fairly simple pro­cess once I’d figured it out.

Firstly, identify your current firmware

Load the admin page of the device with a web browser. At the bot­tom of the page it will say what ver­sion you are on

Do the updates as a multi-stage process using the in-built system

I had to flash 5 firm­ware ver­sions to get up to 8.2, as I was on such an old ver­sion, and a dir­ect leap isn’t sup­por­ted without los­ing con­fig­ur­a­tion. I just used the built in tool (web inter­face; firm­ware upgrade; point to *.bin file. There is an offi­cial Wiki with the migra­tion path details that you should refer to for the most up-to-date inform­a­tion. Cur­rently the pro­cess is (jump into it based on your cur­rent firmware)

If the update goes wrong, you’ll have to reflash the device

I had a couple that did­n’t reboot prop­erly dur­ing the pro­cess. I simply opened them up, con­nec­ted my CH340g, and used Tas­mot­izer 1.1 with the final firm­ware I wanted (at time of writ­ing 8.2). I then had to con­nect to the device dir­ectly via wire­less and set my wifi SSID and pass­word (don’t for­get to tick the box)

Once the devices were updated I had to reconfigure some of them that had previously had custom firmware

The firm­ware has greatly improved the abil­ity to cre­ate a “cus­tom pro­file” for dif­fer­ent types of devices. I have sev­er­al which needed dif­fer­ent con­fig­ur­a­tions. I provide the details for each below. To cre­ate a cus­tom con­fig go to Con­fig­ur­a­tion: Con­fig­ure Tem­plate. I usu­ally select the Sonoff Basic as the start­ing point, and I give the tem­plate an obvi­ous name (e.g. SWA1). Save and the device will restart. Once it has restar­ted go to Con­fig­ur­a­tion: Con­fig­ure Mod­ule: and then select the newly cre­ated tem­plate. The device will then reboot again.

SWA1 modules: Linganzh; COOSA; Annstory

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