Flashing Tasmota on a Sonoff Basic R4 & Configuring for Home Assistant

In October of 2023 Itead released their latest Sonoff Basic appliance module the Basic R4. It is now based off an ESP32 chip, versus the ESP82xx of prior models and provides increased load capabilities at 2400w. This appliance module is cheap and is perfect for attaching to a desk lamp, inline in a power board … Read more

Using Flying Probes for Surface Mount PCB Flashing Of ESP32 & Beyond.

The right tool for the job can make any job enjoyable. I often get sense if happiness using quality tools that make a job easy and painfree. Tools change, I am not just talking in the physical world. Take example my world, cloud computing, look at cloud networking, how we architect connections in the cloud … Read more

Bridging Mosquitto MQTT into Azure IoT Hub with an Arduino based ESP32

I have been on a journey to explore Azure IoT and push the thousands of events that flow through my local MQTT broker (Mosquitto) in to Azure IOT. After my last post in using the Azure IoT SDK for Python conjunction with Paho MQTT I thought my work here was complete, but have just recently … Read more

Flashing Tasmota on a Sonoff Dual R3 & Integrating With Home Assistant

PLC based appliance modules have been something of a staple in my house over the last 10 years and at recent count, I had 72 X10 appliance modules. The challenges with X10 are pretty widely known but with the advances in X10, most of these challenges around reliability can be pretty easily solved. Adding in … Read more