Saturday, 27 August, 2022
Song of the Day: A Day In The Life - The Beatles
Today, after some unpacking and organizing of my tools and parts, I finally got around to messing about with the smart plugs I bought. My intent was to use one to monitor the power consumption of the R620 so as to remove its power draw from my roommate and I’s shared electric bill. The plugs themselves are Sonoff S31s, which contain firmware that communicates with a special app known to “phone home” to China and harvest information. In an effort to circumvent that, I opened the plugs up and flashed Tasmota firmware onto them, which allows me to connect to them over wifi and obviates the usage of the data-mining software.
The process itself was a bit harder than I would have expected. It was my first introduction to UART, and soldering the header pins onto the circuit board was a bit tricky.
At the end of the day however, I managed to get it all set up. I even managed to write up a quick NodeJS script to try out webhooks with Plex. I managed to set up a quick script to turn off a light when a movie began, and then turn it back on once the movie had ended. It actually worked out remarkably well. I’m thinking I might get some more of these in the future to practice with some home automation.