The COMPLETE Guide to Tasmota 2019

today on the hookup I'm gonna show you everything that Tazz Mota can do in August of 2019 we're gonna cover topics like flashing methods templates commands rules and group topics even if you're a long time test motor user stick around for so many people flashing their first store-bought device with Tazz Mota represents the beginning of their smart home journey Tazz Mota started out as a custom firmware I meant only for sawn-off devices but it's transformed into an incredibly powerful tool for controlling everything with an esp8266 Wi-Fi chip as tez Moana has matured new options have popped up to try to unseat the de facto standard but I'm going to show you today why in my opinion Tazz Moana is still the best option in most cases if you don't know what Tazz Mota is this is my quick 45 second sales pitch for it Tazz Mota is an open source custom firmware that runs on any esp8266 based device desmona gives users local control of their devices through either MQTT HTTP or web UI and it comes packed with drivers to support basically every popular sensor or chip that you'd find in off-the-shelf smart home products Tazz Mota is extremely stable and reliable and it allows your devices to be manually controlled in the event of a total network outage Tazz Mota is simple enough for a novice user and has enough advanced options to keep even the most seasoned Automator happy the more devices that you have with Taz Mota the more standardized your smart home will become and the easier it will be to manage this video is going to cover everything from flashing to advanced rules and I've included timestamps down in the description to find what you need or to link to as a reference for helping out other users we're gonna start with the flashing process which will always be the first step in adding Taz Moda to your device there are two general methods for flashing Taz motive there's over-the-air and hardwired using a USB to serial FTDI adapter in my opinion OTA is always easier when it works but most of the OTA methods rely on exploiting vulnerabilities in factory firmware so when companies like IT Eden - you learn about these vulnerabilities they're usually pretty quick to patch them unfortunately that means that depending on the magnify your date of your device there's a good chance that attempting the OTA method will end in frustration and failure that being said when it works it's a huge time-saver so I'll go ahead and leave the link to the to you convert walkthrough and a sawn-off DIY material down in the description if those methods fail then your next option should be to flash it using the hardware method some companies like Shelley make the process extremely simple by providing you with a set of female header pins and a wiring schematic while other products make it nearly impossible by gluing the outer shells together in order to flash your device you're going to need to access five different pins rx which is the serial pin that receives data TX which is the serial pin that transmits data 3.3 volts and ground which provide power to the chip and finally GPIO 0 GPIO 0 is necessary because attaching that pin to ground during the boot process of the esp8266 causes it to go into a special flashing mode that prevents any other code from running on the device since my FTE I adapter has male header pins and most boards have either female headers or through holes in the circuit board I have a set of female to male jumpers that I always use I also created a special jumper wire that's a splitter so I can connect both GPIO 0 and ground on the device that I'm flashing to the ground pin on my FTDI adapter once all the wires are hooked up plug in your FTDI adapter your computer and the ESP chip will boot into flash mode since GPIO 0 is grounded next you'll need to download one of the pre compiled bin files for Taz Mota so head on over to the hack box.org front slash Taz Mota front slash release where you'll find the current stable versions of Taz Mota compiled on different versions of the esp8266 arduino core at the top of the list you'll see a few different variations of the compiled code the difference between each of these bin files is that each one includes different driver files for various sensors and chips as more driver files are included the size of the image increases and in some cases your device may not have enough onboard memory to handle the largest bin file however in that case you likely won't need all the driver files anyways so you can just choose one of the smaller bin files as a general rule I use the sawn-off bin file for all of my devices the other option you have on this page is to choose which version of the esp8266 Arduino core that you want to use Taz Moda offers versions compiled with core to point three point zero two point four point two and two point five point two core to point three point zero is widely regarded as being the most stable version of the esp8266 core and two point four and two point five both introduced some serious memory leaks that negatively impacted performance when they were first released the major downside to using core two point three point zero is that it is still vulnerable to of something called the crack exploit that allows a hacker to possibly compromise the encryption of wpa2 by forcing the reinstallation of an already known encryption key that exploit has been patched in all other versions of the ESP core after two point four point zero personally I use two point four point two for my test motive devices and I haven't noticed any stability issues let me know down in the comments if you've had connectivity issues using other versions other than two point three point zero at this point I use a program called node MCU PI flasher to upload the bin file to my device if you go to the node MCU PI flash or github page and you don't read the directions it seems like you might need to compile the program from source but if you go to the releases tab you can actually just download a pre compiled exe file and get started immediately a major advantage of the node MCU PI flasher over the popular ESP easy tool is that it gives you the option to erase the chip completely before putting the new program on it in some instances this could be completely necessary due to variables that can be stored in the spiffs filesystem that could mess up your new install so I always recommend checking that box if you haven't already plugging your FTDI serial to USB adapter press the refresh button and select Auto detect to find your ESP device automatically select the Sun off that bin file that you downloaded earlier and choose one one five two hundred as the baud rate D out as the flash method and yes to wipe all data once you get the message that the flash was successful you should see a new SSID pop up with the name Sun off with some numbers after it if you connect to that SSID you'll usually be automatically directed to a captive portal to input your Wi-Fi information if you're not automatically redirected then you can open up a browser and go to 192.168.1 to access the web interface after you input the necessary information and press save your device will reboot and you can find its IP address on your network by looking on your router or with a network inspection app like thing whatever method you used you should now be looking at a very basic test mode a home page with sawn-off basic as the module and sawn-off as the name to avoid random restarts due to connection attempts my first action in the Taz mode interface is always to setup MQTT you'll find that option by going to configuration and then configure MQTT if you're not going to use MQTT and you're going to use HTTP only to control your test motor devices then you'll want to disable MQTT completely not only for security but also to avoid any random reconnect restarts to do this you go to console and then you'll type in set option 3 space 0 and press Enter the next task is setting up the pins on your specific device for it's connected relays sensors and outputs this used to be the most time-consuming part of a new test mode installation but with templates all of that headache has gone away after my to convert video it was my goal to set up a database of two-year devices on my website but at the same time another user Blackadder set up a very similar database on his github page his database is great and it uses github pull request format to allow users to submit new templates and make corrections to existing ones it's so good in fact that I actually just linked to his template page on my website now instead of maintaining my old database The Blackout our template database allows you to browse devices by region or type and each device includes a picture since many of these devices are actually just white label products they're being sold by many different resellers and they should all work with the same template once you find your device all you need to do is copy the JSON text from the devices database paste it into the template field of the configure other menu in DES mota check the box that says activate and then press save once your device restarts you should now have a fully functional device with controls for each relay or light and a display for all of your sensors at this point you're finished with the general configuration of test Moda you've barely scratch the surface of what's possible next you'll want to integrate tez moto with your home automation platform of choice I'm not going to specifically cover each configuration in this video since we're talking about tez moto today and not home automation platforms but I've got links down in the description for how to integrate tez Moda specifically with home assistant openhab smartthings and habitat if you're trying to stay hub free Taz Moda also supports local Amazon echo integration to enable echo integration go to configuration and then configure other here you're going to select hue bridge for your Alexa integration and change your devices friendly name the friendly name is what will show up on your Amazon echo app when you discover devices if your device has multiple relays you can create a friendly name for each one and your echo device will discover each one separately if you are integrating into a hub both home assistant and openhab are going to use mqtt to issue commands to tez Moda well smart things and habitat use HTTP but the great thing is that all the commands are actually the same and no matter what you need to do whether you're changing the mode of a switch turning off an LED status light or calibrating the power usage of your device you'll probably find a command for that option and the extensive test mode of documentation when issuing commands via HTTP you just point your web browser to the IP address of the Taz motor device and then you tack on CM question mark cm and D equals and then the command that you want to issue you're gonna put in percent 20 which is how you input a space in a URL and then the value that you want to issue in that command for instance if I wanted to change switch 1 from a momentary switch to one that always followed the state of the light switch I'd send this command after that the Taz motor device will respond with a JSON formatted message showing that my command was accepted and that specific setting was changed if you're issuing commands via MQTT the topic will be CMD front slash device ID front slash and then the command that you're trying to use and then for the payload you put in whatever you want to change it to so to change switch 1 back to a push-button switch I'd send the MQTT message to this topic with a payload of 5 and Tazz Mota will respond with a JSON formatted state message on the result topic which for this device would be stat front slash cabinet lights front slash result a huge benefit of using MQTT is that you can issue the same command to every test motor device at the same time by using your Tazz Mota group topic by default the group topic is sawn offs so let's say you wanted all of your Tazz mono devices to report their current and relay state to you you can send an mqtt message to the topic CM ND front slash son offs front slash power one then if you sent a payload of one it would turn all your devices on or a payload of 0 would turn them all off but if you send an invalid payload like check it will cause all of your devices to send whatever their current state is this method is commonly used to solve the problem that home assistant doesn't know the state of your mqtt devices after a restart the group topic also makes things like changing your SSID and password super simple since you can issue a single MQTT command to change every task on a device in your house at the same time if you choose to issue commands via the web interface you'll just open up the console type in your command then space then the value that you want to change it to so to change the switch to an edge switch or one that sends a toggle command every time the switch changes state will just enter switch mode one space 7 and then you'll see the result issued in the console on the very next line in certain cases it may be beneficial to use something called the backlogged command to enter many commands at once an example of this would be if you're trying to change your SSID or password if you just issued the single command SSID and then your new SSID it would immediately change the Wi-Fi network to that new value which would trigger the device to reboot however if you also needed to change your password then your tez motor device wouldn't be able to join your new network and you'd have no way of issuing that command to set the new password instead you'd use a backlog command in a backlog command you separate each command with a semicolon and then test motor will process them in order before trying to restart for instance for changing our Wi-Fi network like before we'd instead use the backlog command backlog SSID 1 my new network semicolon password1 my new password that's going to prevent your tez motor device from rebooting until all the commands have been issued so your Wi-Fi SSID and your password will change together and your device will be able to properly connect to your new network in the very rare event that your specific need isn't already baked into the tasmat firmware you can also get a little more advanced and set up rules to let tez motor handle some logic the Taz motor rules engine is event based so you'll always need some trigger to begin the rule let's say for instance we wanted to do some advanced control of a fan and we wanted that fan to turn on whenever the temperature was above 100 degrees Fahrenheit and then off whenever the temperature was below say 90 degrees Fahrenheit if we had a device with a relay and a temperature sensor we could write a rule for that we'll start our rule by telling tez modo which of the three tez motor rule sets were defining which in this case is going to be rule 1 and then our trigger is going to be the temperature of an AM 2301 temperature sensor so we'll start out our rule by typing rule 1 on am 2301 temperature is greater than 100 and then we'll give it an action or something to do so we'll add do power 1 1 and since we don't need to do anything else on that trigger well end the statement with the word end on then in the same rule we can add another trigger to turn the fan back off if the temperature ever goes below 90 so our final rule will end up looking like this the last thing you need to do after defining rules is to turn that specific rule on so to do that we're gonna type in rule 1 space 1 and then hit enter you can even use rules to allow devices to talk to each other without the need for a Smart Home Hub by changing just a few things in that previous rule set we can have the device from the temperature sensor issue a command to a separate device to turn a relay on or off to do this we would utilize the web send command to send an HTTP request and it would end up looking something like this there are tons of different triggers that can be used to start your rules and you can use any of the commands we talked about earlier as actions including the backlogged command so you can have a single trigger caused multiple actions and you can even add delays in between them there's a great page in the tasmad documentation that has different rules that you can utilize as templates for your own specific needs as you can see Tazz Mota is an absolutely insanely powerful firmware that gives you local control and thousands of configurable options that don't require any knowledge of C++ and are relatively intuitive to use I am a firm believer that mqtt and home assistant are the best way to manage IOT devices but as you can see the native Amazon echo integration the ability to send commands over HTTP and the rules that can create automations directly on your devices makes tez Moda a great choice even if you don't have a smart home hub as always if you enjoyed this video make sure you hit that thumbs up button so it gets shared with other people who haven't found the channel yet thank you to all of my awesome patrons over at patreon for continuing to support my channel and allowing me to make videos like this one that feature free and open source software like Taz Mota and home assistant if you're interested in supporting my channel please check out the links down in the description if you enjoyed this video please consider subscribing and as always thanks for watching the hook-up [Music]

Channel: The Hook Up

Views: 205,123

Rating: 4.9571328 out of 5

Keywords: home assistant, hassio, home automation, hass.io, smart home, diy, electronics, arduino, esp8266, nodemcu, wemos d1, automation, custom, firmware, tasmota, flash, local, secure, mqtt, smart, tuya, upgrade, rules, wire, wiring, nodemcupyflasher, pyflasher

Id: 08_GBROKQH0

Length: 16min 41sec (1001 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 28 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/MrAlfabet]

Keep it up dude, love your videos! Tip: create a reddit account with the youtube channel name.

[u/nickjedl]

I'm supposed to study for an exam, but video's like this are making it increasingly more difficult to focus! Why do you do this to me Rob???

[u/oneuptwo]

Great presentation format. A quick intro to tell me what you’re gonna tell me and what’s in it for me. Organized detail. A wrap up summary of what you told me. Clean audio. Meaningful visuals. This content is not relevant to me, but I enjoyed watching your video and learning about something I knew nothing about.

[u/[deleted]]

Anybody know a nice easy to flash smart plug? I've flashed several Tuya plugs before but the last three I ordered all came in with updated firmwares :(

[u/shiftedkidney]

If I publish tas/garage/powerbar/cmnd/state, I get a new post under tas/garage/powerbar/stat/RESULT, which HomeAssistant parses to update device state, but if I publish cmnd/sonoffs/state, or cmnd/sonoffs/power, I get a new post under tas/garage/powerbar/tele/STATE, which HomeAssistant doesn't parse. Is there a topic I can publish to for a group to publish to the stat/RESULT rather than tele/STATE so I don't need to create an "update state on boot" automation for each of my Tasmota devices?

[u/walkerleigh]

Wow! Can't believe how easy that was with NodeMCU pyFlasher, great tip about the blackadder template repository.