6 ms·

Tasmota: Cloud-free open source smart home firmware for ESP8266 devices

193 points by noja 6y ago

errantspark 6y ago
Good stuff, my dad showed this to me as he was working on some home automation and now I'm using it to control the vent fan in my van. I love the ESP8266, it's such a fun little platform and it's very easy to find accessories for them. The little relay board I have was essentially plug and play.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  Shout out to the "IZOKEE Development Board for ESP8266" I have fallen in love with for being so goddamn cheap!
  - gurjeet 6y ago
    For first timers, like me, who are curious about it, I found this video to be a good intro to the module and how to code it.
- ahaucnx 6y ago
  Yes I agree. I totally love the ESP8266. Especially on the Wemos D1 Mini board. We use it for our open source air quality sensor. https://www.airgradient.com/diy/ https://www.airgradient.com/diy/
jcims 6y ago
I have a project at home that uses a bunch of thermocouples, power controllers, current sensors, etc. I was trying to run them all off a raspberry pi running node red. It started off OK but quickly ran into trouble after the hardware started scaling up (particularly the thermocouples) I had an esp8266 sitting around, so I flashed it with tasmota, configured it to run four thermocouples, and then tied it back to the raspberry pi via MQTT message bus. It's absolutely fantastic. I put a second one together to run a small portable load cell setup for measuring output rate of the process and pipe all of those measurements through MQTT as well. Plan is to create a flash/configure pipeline so i can swap out the ESP boards and/or easily tack more on over time. Ultimately would like to get all of the hardware off of the PI and have spare ESP8266 boards around so i have a bit of redundancy. Tons of capability for the money and the process of getting Tasmota up and running with a standard sensor couldn't have been easier. Lots of fun!!!
- gibs0ns 6y ago
  It might be worth looking at ESPHome (https://esphome.io/ https://esphome.io/), it's very similar to Tasmota but modular and is configured via yaml files. It also supports OTA updates for firmware/config changes (after the initial flash). I feel ESPHome scales better than Tasmota for these reasons - no need to visit the individual web UI's for each Tasmota device, using ESPHome you can update your configs from a central web UI and then push the changes to your devices via wifi. TLDR; Tasmota is great for bespoke devices, but IMO ESPHome is better because it's modular and supports OTA updates.
  - Uberphallus 6y ago
    If you want a comprehensive comparison between ESPhome and Tasmota, The Guy With The Swiss Accent[0] got you covered. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHaFM0tKOvY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHaFM0tKOvY
    - elheffe80 6y ago
      THIS is such a great video! I had just flashed some wifi lightbulbs with Tasmota and was going to go with ESPHome but the lazyman in me just left it along. If I had watched this video first, I would have followed through. Now everything is setup and working I am not going to go through and change it all again.
  - gnyman 6y ago
    Second the recommendation for esphome, especially if you are trying to do something a little smarter than just a remotely controlled switch. I started with tasmota for my little wastewater pump controller but I found it hard to get my simple if-this-then-that logic to work in tasmota. ESP home on the other hand allows you to write you own C/++ code if you want.
    - lostlogin 6y ago
      I didn’t know you could write your own code with ESPHome, I’ll have to dig deeper. When I hit a limit I went to Arduino and then hooked that into Home Assistant via and MQTT broker - Mosquitto.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
preya2k 6y ago
It is a fantastic piece of software. It does exactly what it’s supposed to do, helps you to avoid scammy default firmware of IoT devices and has a great community. I’m a huge fan and have two dozen of Tasmota devices scattered around my place (mostly Shelly and Sonoff). This (for me) is the most promising Smart Home ecosystem.
1024core 6y ago
Can you flash Tasmota on to devices without using additional hardware (other than a Linux desktop with Wifi, for example)? Last I checked you had to do soldering, etc.
- dann0 6y ago
  The ease or difficulty of re-flashing is dependent on the hardware. Some (most?) still need soldering, or at least a steady hand to hold wires in place, but the soldering on some things is far easier than others. I've managed to flash half a dozen Sonoff light switches, as many power outlet switches, a whole bunch of Wemos D1 Minis, and even my kettle. Its generally straight forward and the first one is always the trickiest. Initial OTA flashing might be a thing on some devices, but hasn't been on the Sonoff thing I have for a while. Once flashed though, you never need to touch the hardware again. It's been a fun project or two.
- rytis 6y ago
  Depends on the devices. Some are possible to flash over the air. Have a look here: https://github.com/kueblc/tuya-convert/tree/new-api https://github.com/kueblc/tuya-convert/tree/new-api
- tga 6y ago
  For some devices, yes. Tuyas are quite popular: https://tasmota.github.io/docs/Tuya-Convert https://tasmota.github.io/docs/Tuya-Convert Sonoff too, apparently depending on which firmware version they come with: https://github.com/mirko/SonOTA https://github.com/mirko/SonOTA
- ahartmetz 6y ago
  On Sonoff devices: https://tasmota.github.io/docs/Sonoff-DIY/#compatible-devices https://tasmota.github.io/docs/Sonoff-DIY/#compatible-device... Also notable is that you can get Tasmota-capable Wifi power sockets for about 10€ if you are willing and able to use some electronics tools. I have three of them with Tasmota. The first took about two hours to flash with some trial and error, the other two about an hour for both.
- gruturo 6y ago
teekert 6y ago
I love this project, Tasmota on a Sonoff basic makes the fan in my toilet switch on when my Hue motion detector detects motion (and switches the light on), using Home Assistant for the logic. My proudest and most useful automation! Once you flash it and turn it on, it becomes a hotspot to help configure it to your own network, so smart, from that day on: OTA updates. Mine is hidden in the ceiling and has been there without problems for over a year now.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  A motion detector for bathroom motions is exactly the level of humour I appreciate. I’ve only just started messing with relays and overcoming the terror of 240V was the biggest hurdle - I made a ventilation system that pushes air from either outside or from above a wood burner. It has a pair of motors that open and close and they are controlled by an ESP32 - this worked better than an ESP8266 as the output voltage was 5v rather than 3v. The lower voltage seemed to crap out for some reason, probably because the relay wanted 5v.
tda 6y ago
I'm personally a great fan of esphome.io. Use simple yaml files to configure a firmware built exactly to your whishes for various esp32 and esp8266 variants. Includes support for a ton of peripherals. The list of supported hardware is actually a great place to look for which sensors are commonly used for for e.g. air quality, c02, temperature, humidity, power monitoring etc. Almost all supported sensors are available for a few bucks on aliexpress or equivalents. You can connect the result to home assistant, but you can also move all or some of the logic to the board. So your light still switches on when motion is detected when your WiFi or the server is down. But if motion is detected at certain hours, you'll get a notification via home assistant
- misterdata 6y ago
  This. ESPHome additionally provides a minimal form of "device management" for larger numbers of devices, including OTA updates of firmware. This is an often underestimated aspect of HA; having many devices of different types buried in your home's walls and ceilings will get cumbersome to maintain, update and replace very quickly.
- madjam002 6y ago
  I love ESPhome. I don’t use their web interface or anything for management, instead I have all of my config in a repo as “infrastructure as code” which gets deployed to all of my devices in one command.
ncmncm 6y ago
Is this work more-or-less extensible to other microcontroller RF stuff like Espressif and Nordic modules?
londons_explore 6y ago
Beware that the tasmota rules engine has a bunch of bugs in, and the maintainers aren't interested in fixing (or even documenting) the bugs for fear that users now rely on the bugs. They mostly stem from the fact the engine does no tokenizing, and all parsing is ad-hoc. That makes implementing anything more complex than "when this sensor goes to this state, do that" very hard, because you'll hit bug after bug.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
  I'm a bit puzzled by your comment because I just had a look at their closed bugs page on GitHub and it looks these devs really work hard at fixing whatever people throw at them. Could you give an example of a bug they refused to fix/document?
- Jason2866 6y ago
  The project owner (Theo Arends) tries to solve any bug in 1-2 days. If you have found a bug please open a issue. It will be solved!!! I use Tasmota since 3 years. I have found NO other project with so many supported features running so stable with a ESP8266.
dirktheman 6y ago
I love Tasmota! I have a large cooker hood that I built into an alcove. Works fine, except my wife and children can't reach the buttons. I soldered wires to the button circuit board and connected a Sonoff 4CH Pro (basically 4 wifi connected relays) and a Sonoff remote control. Not only can I operate the cooker hood with the remote control, through Home Assistant I also made an automation where I just shout 'Hey Google let's cook', which turns on all the lights in the kitchen and dining room and turns on the fan.
timonoko 6y ago
With Micropython you need to flash only once. Thereafter you can do reprogramming via de internets from anyplace. https://github.com/timonoko/Webserver-for-ESP8266-4-ch-relay https://github.com/timonoko/Webserver-for-ESP8266-4-ch-relay
- StavrosK 6y ago
  Same with the Arduino framework, if we're talking about languages/frameworks: https://gitlab.com/stavros/espota-server https://gitlab.com/stavros/espota-server
StavrosK 6y ago
I've never used Tasmota (though I've heard great things), but I'd like to give props to ESPurna, another similar project: https://github.com/xoseperez/espurna https://github.com/xoseperez/espurna I use it for so many things around the house that the WiFi spectrum is probably completely saturated, it's fantastic. It even supports auto-update over HTTP, so all my devices periodically talk to my home server to see if a new firmware is available using a simple server I wrote: https://gitlab.com/stavros/espota-server https://gitlab.com/stavros/espota-server Since I'm very familiar with ESPurna but not with TASMOTA or ESPHome, I can share some of its drawbacks: * Provisioning is hard. I have tens of devices and I want to deploy firmware on them with specific settings already preloaded, so I can just flash it and have it automatically connect to my Wifi, MQTT server, autoupdate server, etc. Not only do I need to compile my own firmware for this, but I need to compile one version of the firmware per device type. This isn't too much of a hassle, I wrote a simple for loop to do it, but what is a hassle is that my configuration needs to be in the form of #defines in a header file, which makes updating a big pain, as I have to figure out what upstream changes were made and how to merge them with mine. Actually, that's the only drawback I've found, it's otherwise worked perfectly, the community is great, the maintainer is very responsive and the software does what I need and more. Definitely recommended.
- BuildTheRobots 6y ago
  The developer of ESPurna is a lovely person and fantastically responsive to ideas on how to extend the firmware. I personally find the offline scheduling to be a life saver - I can have smart-ish home devices that 'just work' even when I don't have or keep swapping between different smart-home controllers.

193 points by noja 6y ago

Good stuff, my dad showed this to me as he was working on some home automation and now I'm using it to control the vent fan in my van. I love the ESP8266, it's such a fun little platform and it's very easy to find accessories for them. The little relay board I have was essentially plug and play.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
Shout out to the "IZOKEE Development Board for ESP8266" I have fallen in love with for being so goddamn cheap!
- gurjeet 6y ago
  For first timers, like me, who are curious about it, I found this video to be a good intro to the module and how to code it.
ahaucnx 6y ago
Yes I agree. I totally love the ESP8266. Especially on the Wemos D1 Mini board. We use it for our open source air quality sensor. https://www.airgradient.com/diy/ https://www.airgradient.com/diy/

jcims 6y ago

I have a project at home that uses a bunch of thermocouples, power controllers, current sensors, etc. I was trying to run them all off a raspberry pi running node red. It started off OK but quickly ran into trouble after the hardware started scaling up (particularly the thermocouples) I had an esp8266 sitting around, so I flashed it with tasmota, configured it to run four thermocouples, and then tied it back to the raspberry pi via MQTT message bus. It's absolutely fantastic. I put a second one together to run a small portable load cell setup for measuring output rate of the process and pipe all of those measurements through MQTT as well. Plan is to create a flash/configure pipeline so i can swap out the ESP boards and/or easily tack more on over time. Ultimately would like to get all of the hardware off of the PI and have spare ESP8266 boards around so i have a bit of redundancy. Tons of capability for the money and the process of getting Tasmota up and running with a standard sensor couldn't have been easier. Lots of fun!!!

gibs0ns 6y ago
It might be worth looking at ESPHome (https://esphome.io/ https://esphome.io/), it's very similar to Tasmota but modular and is configured via yaml files. It also supports OTA updates for firmware/config changes (after the initial flash). I feel ESPHome scales better than Tasmota for these reasons - no need to visit the individual web UI's for each Tasmota device, using ESPHome you can update your configs from a central web UI and then push the changes to your devices via wifi. TLDR; Tasmota is great for bespoke devices, but IMO ESPHome is better because it's modular and supports OTA updates.
- Uberphallus 6y ago
  If you want a comprehensive comparison between ESPhome and Tasmota, The Guy With The Swiss Accent[0] got you covered. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHaFM0tKOvY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHaFM0tKOvY
  - elheffe80 6y ago
    THIS is such a great video! I had just flashed some wifi lightbulbs with Tasmota and was going to go with ESPHome but the lazyman in me just left it along. If I had watched this video first, I would have followed through. Now everything is setup and working I am not going to go through and change it all again.
- gnyman 6y ago
  Second the recommendation for esphome, especially if you are trying to do something a little smarter than just a remotely controlled switch. I started with tasmota for my little wastewater pump controller but I found it hard to get my simple if-this-then-that logic to work in tasmota. ESP home on the other hand allows you to write you own C/++ code if you want.
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    I didn’t know you could write your own code with ESPHome, I’ll have to dig deeper. When I hit a limit I went to Arduino and then hooked that into Home Assistant via and MQTT broker - Mosquitto.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

preya2k 6y ago

It is a fantastic piece of software. It does exactly what it’s supposed to do, helps you to avoid scammy default firmware of IoT devices and has a great community. I’m a huge fan and have two dozen of Tasmota devices scattered around my place (mostly Shelly and Sonoff). This (for me) is the most promising Smart Home ecosystem.

1024core 6y ago

Can you flash Tasmota on to devices without using additional hardware (other than a Linux desktop with Wifi, for example)? Last I checked you had to do soldering, etc.

dann0 6y ago
The ease or difficulty of re-flashing is dependent on the hardware. Some (most?) still need soldering, or at least a steady hand to hold wires in place, but the soldering on some things is far easier than others. I've managed to flash half a dozen Sonoff light switches, as many power outlet switches, a whole bunch of Wemos D1 Minis, and even my kettle. Its generally straight forward and the first one is always the trickiest. Initial OTA flashing might be a thing on some devices, but hasn't been on the Sonoff thing I have for a while. Once flashed though, you never need to touch the hardware again. It's been a fun project or two.
rytis 6y ago
Depends on the devices. Some are possible to flash over the air. Have a look here: https://github.com/kueblc/tuya-convert/tree/new-api https://github.com/kueblc/tuya-convert/tree/new-api
tga 6y ago
For some devices, yes. Tuyas are quite popular: https://tasmota.github.io/docs/Tuya-Convert https://tasmota.github.io/docs/Tuya-Convert Sonoff too, apparently depending on which firmware version they come with: https://github.com/mirko/SonOTA https://github.com/mirko/SonOTA
ahartmetz 6y ago
On Sonoff devices: https://tasmota.github.io/docs/Sonoff-DIY/#compatible-devices https://tasmota.github.io/docs/Sonoff-DIY/#compatible-device... Also notable is that you can get Tasmota-capable Wifi power sockets for about 10€ if you are willing and able to use some electronics tools. I have three of them with Tasmota. The first took about two hours to flash with some trial and error, the other two about an hour for both.
gruturo 6y ago

teekert 6y ago

I love this project, Tasmota on a Sonoff basic makes the fan in my toilet switch on when my Hue motion detector detects motion (and switches the light on), using Home Assistant for the logic. My proudest and most useful automation! Once you flash it and turn it on, it becomes a hotspot to help configure it to your own network, so smart, from that day on: OTA updates. Mine is hidden in the ceiling and has been there without problems for over a year now.

lostlogin 6y ago
A motion detector for bathroom motions is exactly the level of humour I appreciate. I’ve only just started messing with relays and overcoming the terror of 240V was the biggest hurdle - I made a ventilation system that pushes air from either outside or from above a wood burner. It has a pair of motors that open and close and they are controlled by an ESP32 - this worked better than an ESP8266 as the output voltage was 5v rather than 3v. The lower voltage seemed to crap out for some reason, probably because the relay wanted 5v.

tda 6y ago

I'm personally a great fan of esphome.io. Use simple yaml files to configure a firmware built exactly to your whishes for various esp32 and esp8266 variants. Includes support for a ton of peripherals. The list of supported hardware is actually a great place to look for which sensors are commonly used for for e.g. air quality, c02, temperature, humidity, power monitoring etc. Almost all supported sensors are available for a few bucks on aliexpress or equivalents. You can connect the result to home assistant, but you can also move all or some of the logic to the board. So your light still switches on when motion is detected when your WiFi or the server is down. But if motion is detected at certain hours, you'll get a notification via home assistant

misterdata 6y ago
This. ESPHome additionally provides a minimal form of "device management" for larger numbers of devices, including OTA updates of firmware. This is an often underestimated aspect of HA; having many devices of different types buried in your home's walls and ceilings will get cumbersome to maintain, update and replace very quickly.
madjam002 6y ago
I love ESPhome. I don’t use their web interface or anything for management, instead I have all of my config in a repo as “infrastructure as code” which gets deployed to all of my devices in one command.

ncmncm 6y ago

Is this work more-or-less extensible to other microcontroller RF stuff like Espressif and Nordic modules?

londons_explore 6y ago

Beware that the tasmota rules engine has a bunch of bugs in, and the maintainers aren't interested in fixing (or even documenting) the bugs for fear that users now rely on the bugs. They mostly stem from the fact the engine does no tokenizing, and all parsing is ad-hoc. That makes implementing anything more complex than "when this sensor goes to this state, do that" very hard, because you'll hit bug after bug.

dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
I'm a bit puzzled by your comment because I just had a look at their closed bugs page on GitHub and it looks these devs really work hard at fixing whatever people throw at them. Could you give an example of a bug they refused to fix/document?
Jason2866 6y ago
The project owner (Theo Arends) tries to solve any bug in 1-2 days. If you have found a bug please open a issue. It will be solved!!! I use Tasmota since 3 years. I have found NO other project with so many supported features running so stable with a ESP8266.

dirktheman 6y ago

I love Tasmota! I have a large cooker hood that I built into an alcove. Works fine, except my wife and children can't reach the buttons. I soldered wires to the button circuit board and connected a Sonoff 4CH Pro (basically 4 wifi connected relays) and a Sonoff remote control. Not only can I operate the cooker hood with the remote control, through Home Assistant I also made an automation where I just shout 'Hey Google let's cook', which turns on all the lights in the kitchen and dining room and turns on the fan.

timonoko 6y ago

With Micropython you need to flash only once. Thereafter you can do reprogramming via de internets from anyplace. https://github.com/timonoko/Webserver-for-ESP8266-4-ch-relay https://github.com/timonoko/Webserver-for-ESP8266-4-ch-relay

StavrosK 6y ago
Same with the Arduino framework, if we're talking about languages/frameworks: https://gitlab.com/stavros/espota-server https://gitlab.com/stavros/espota-server

StavrosK 6y ago

I've never used Tasmota (though I've heard great things), but I'd like to give props to ESPurna, another similar project: https://github.com/xoseperez/espurna https://github.com/xoseperez/espurna I use it for so many things around the house that the WiFi spectrum is probably completely saturated, it's fantastic. It even supports auto-update over HTTP, so all my devices periodically talk to my home server to see if a new firmware is available using a simple server I wrote: https://gitlab.com/stavros/espota-server https://gitlab.com/stavros/espota-server Since I'm very familiar with ESPurna but not with TASMOTA or ESPHome, I can share some of its drawbacks: * Provisioning is hard. I have tens of devices and I want to deploy firmware on them with specific settings already preloaded, so I can just flash it and have it automatically connect to my Wifi, MQTT server, autoupdate server, etc. Not only do I need to compile my own firmware for this, but I need to compile one version of the firmware per device type. This isn't too much of a hassle, I wrote a simple for loop to do it, but what is a hassle is that my configuration needs to be in the form of #defines in a header file, which makes updating a big pain, as I have to figure out what upstream changes were made and how to merge them with mine. Actually, that's the only drawback I've found, it's otherwise worked perfectly, the community is great, the maintainer is very responsive and the software does what I need and more. Definitely recommended.

BuildTheRobots 6y ago
The developer of ESPurna is a lovely person and fantastically responsive to ideas on how to extend the firmware. I personally find the offline scheduling to be a life saver - I can have smart-ish home devices that 'just work' even when I don't have or keep swapping between different smart-home controllers.