Bricked smart plug ?

c0nsaw

Hey everyone,

I have several Tasmota smart plugs from your brand, all working flawlessly and capturing energy consumption data displayed via my Home Assistant dashboard. They’ve been fantastic.

Today, I decided to experiment a bit and see if I could flash one of them with ESPHome. Unfortunately, I think I may have bricked it. Is there any way to recover it?

Here’s what I did:

I generated a firmware.bin file using the ESPHome Docker container. The YAML configuration seemed fine, and everything compiled without issues.
I uploaded the firmware.bin via the existing Tasmota web UI for that device.

After doing this, I have no response from the device. The small button on the side doesn’t light up blue anymore, and I don’t think it’s even getting power.
Here’s the YAML configuration I used:

esphome:
  name: office
  platform: ESP8266
  board: esp01_1m
wifi:
  ssid: "xxxx"
  password: "xxxxx"
  fast_connect: true
  manual_ip:
    static_ip: 192.168.1.40
    gateway: 192.168.1.1
    subnet: 255.255.255.0
logger:
api:
ota:

I do see online now an easier way to what I was doing……

Any guidance on how to recover the device would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

jane_t

You don’t appear to have any code in your YAML to actually control the plug?
Can you ping the IP and or visit it with a web browser? If so you can use the correct Yaml for the plug.
Assuming it was a Local Bytes one something like:

substitutions: name: localbytes-plug-pm friendly_name: Localbytes Plug PM packages: localbytes.plug-pm: github://LocalBytes/esphome-localbytes-plug/localbytes-plug-pm.yaml@main esphome: name: ${name} name_add_mac_suffix: false friendly_name: ${friendly_name} api: encryption: key: xxxxxxxxxxxxx wifi: ssid: !secret wifi_ssid password: !secret wifi_password

jane_t

The package in the script above has all the code to tell ESPHome which GPIO pin everything is on.

c0nsaw

Hi Jane, no ping, I don’t believe there’s any power going to it, as the light remains off, I haven’t tried to open the plug, is there anything like a recovery mode some, or it needs to be reflashed if I could open it up somehow, I know it’s not supported like that, but that’s on me…..in other news I was able successfully reflash my 5 other localbytes plugs without issues

archie

c0nsaw

Hi, sorry to hear you’re having issues with the plug. @jane_t is right that with the extremely basic config you uploaded, the plug is not going to do anything - including turning on the blue light. This is because the light is controlled by the microcontroller, rather than automatically turning on. This allows the firmware we ship by default to have a toggle to enable or disable the light.

You are fortunate that you included the ota: option in your configuration. This should allow you to re-upload a new version of the firmware.

If you re-plug the device into power, can you see in your router if the device connects to your network?

If it does, then you should be able to apply an ota update using esphome. You mentioned that you used the esphome docker container to build the original image. Most people now recommend using the ESPHome Home Assistant Addon to manage updates and configuration for their devices. If you are able to do that, it should be a case of adding the device to home assistant, and clicking adopt from the esphome addon. From there you will be able to modify your configuration.

If you cannot use the esphome addon (i.e, you’re not running a supervised version of home assistant), you should also be able to run the update using the esphome command line interface. https://esphome.io/guides/getting_started_command_line.html#

c0nsaw

Thanks Archie, yeah Im thinking its a dead duck, its not currently on my network via the static IP I assigned it (or any IP ) nor is it broadcasting its own WIFI, ah well !! LOL, my own fault.

Yeah I discovered the ESPHome dashboard after my first failure, and I was easily able use that to adopt the rest of my plugs !!

No worries, cheers all we live and learn !!

Side note, I did open the plug hoping to see a micro usb on it, but no

BUT it very nicely made, super clean board, great work all