Unhappy with Sonoff/Ewelink - Frequent drops

General
1

Hey All,
I've been running a couple of Sonoff smart plugs for the past few months and it's been less than stable. Occasionally it's a if my credentials expire and I have to reenter them and it works for a while. About a week ago this happened but it will no longer accept my credentials. I updated my password, still nothing.

Meanwhile this equipment is almost always available via the Ewelink phone app, no Node-Red functionality; not my preference.

Is anyone else having this kind of trouble?

I'll be using Tasmota stuff in the future.
Thanks
Rich

2

Maybe you can reflash the plugs with Tasmota, which after all is an acronym: Theo Arends Sonoff MQTT Over The AIr.

Some devices can even be reflashed without opening them up, not sure about the Sonoffs.

2 Likes
3

I tried to do this a while back and ruined a sonoff plug by soldering the programming headers and destroying the board. I've done plenty of soldering over the years but the pads on these boards is very delicate. Now that I know that I could probably be careful and get away with it... I'd prefer not to.

4

The SonOff S20 has holes where you can solder header pins - so easy to flash with another firmware.

The S26 only have tiny pads that can be destroyed with too much heat from a soldering - as I know to my cost. If you look carefully on the PCB you can see where the tracks from the pads go to on the connector for the tiny daughter board. Here's the very rough sketch I made when I had to salvage one of my S26s.
Hope this helps to get your SonOff working again.

s26-pads
s26-pads716Ă—955 52.2 KB

1 Like
5

Best way for those kinds of devices are to get some pogo pins so you don't need to solder in such a tight space. You could probably make your own jig with some metal pins, a cloths peg and some hot glue as an alternative. :slight_smile: I'm sure I've seen some YouTube vids in the past.

1 Like
6

I was unsuccessful trying to flash my R2s. The soldering wasn’t too hard, just couldn’t get the firmware to take no matter what I did. On the other hand, I’ve only had one time where things wouldn’t connect and I’m not sure what it was all about. Rebooting everything seemed to fix it. These devices do have a “local” mode switch in the app that is supposed to eliminate the requirement for the app but not sure how effective that is.

7

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.