I was excited to see the dev pads on the Oittm ESP8266 Smart plug. I finally found some time to open this up and hook up the wires. My hopes weren’t too high, but since it’s a rather small brand and the plug is built from the modules I hoped for an easy access to the firmware.
Hacking ESP8266 smart plug
I quickly connected the power wires and tested the unit. It powers up the ESP8266 as expected. It was time to run the Tx and Rx connections. I have used an FTD1232 serial to USB adapter.
The hookup guide is pretty simple just follow the table below:
| FTD1232 | Oittm Smart Socket |
| VCC | 3.3V |
| GND | GND |
| RX | TX |
| TX | RX |
| GND | GPIO 00 (don’t connect yet) |
Unplug the FTD1232 serial adapter and pull the GPIO00 low, then power it on, and disconnect the GPIO00 from the ground to enable the flash mode. From there procedure is pretty simple, and if you don’t know how to backup and flash the software using esptool, I have the setup guide here.
Once you have the backup of the original firmware, keep it safe. Just in case you need to flash it back. The Oittm Smart Plug is not a gadget that has a lot of community support, but I took a dive and tried to set up the AFE Firmware. The software supports:
- MQTT
- HTTP requests
- Domoticz
Which is enough out of the box to play with NodeRED and the ESP8266 based gadgets. I picked the ESP8266 version which supports a single relay and flashed it to the Oittm Smart Socket.
It took me a couple of minutes to figure out the correct pin assignments.
- LED – GPIO13
- Relay – GPIO04
- Button – GPIO12
With these in place, I was able to complete the config and add the smart socket to my home automation set up. I talked about the AFE Firmware before and I explained how to use the MQTT and HTTP protocols in this post. Check the software part of this guide to learn how to integrate the device with your NodeRED setup.
The effect?
I have yet another smart socket at home. It was time to add it to some ridiculously overengineered solution. This time I linked Amazon Dash buttons and £8 Tesco torches together to create this awesome effect. You can read more about the smarter storage space here.
