The Edge Devices - Sonoff, ESP8266 and Tasmota

Sonoff, ESP8266 and Tasmota, how are these 3 components related? This can be viewed as a computer where Sonoff is the computer, ESP8266 is the CPU and Tasmota is the Operating System.

Sonoff is one of many companies in China which manufactures smart home WIFI connected devices such as switches, plugs and lights. Their devices are very popular among DIY smart home builders because they make it convenient to flash custom firmware. I have bought a few of such devices, Basic Switch, RF-Wifi Switch, Wall socket and Light Switch. This can be easily found on Aliexpress, Taobao and Banggood, Videos and articles on how to modify to custom firmware can be found on Youtube.

ESP8266 is one of the amazing makers modules that come out after Arduino. Espressif has make the ESP Microcontroller programmable using the Arduino IDE. The library has the entire TCP stack built in making it possible to be programmed as a mini web server, tcp/udp server/client. There a complete library available which make this task a lot easier.

Tasmota is an open source project created by arendst. The software that allowed Sonoff hardware and ESP8266 based modules to have unlimited interfacing capabilities using minimal programming effort. It has OTA capability, MQTT connectivity and a web interface to configure the module. Kudos to him to be able to squeeze so much functionalities into a 1 MBits flash, that is 128kb of flash.

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