Tasmota support in nymea

[michael...@guh.io]

Hi, I'm Michael, I'm a developer for nymea and I am writing here because I've added Tasmota support to nymea. For one I hoped some of you might find that interesting as users, but also, I'd like to ask you for help with testing. I own a couple of Sonoff T1 (2CH) switches which I used for testing but I could not test all the other hardware.

But let me take a step back first. I suppose not many of you have heard of nymea before. While we've been working on it for quite some time now and it reached a state where it can certainly be considered mature enough to be used, it's still a somewhat new player in the game. So, what it is:

Nymea is an open source IoT platform, namely, it is a plugin based system to integrate all sorts of devices/services/etc. Some of you may think of OpenHAB or HomeAssistant now and that's right, nymea can be used like that. However, nymea tries to be more than that, it also is a collection of services and libraries used to build IoT devices but we're getting off topic here... The important bit for this thread is indeed the smart home use case. One more info on that note is that we try to be very easy on configuration. There is no need to dive into command lines, config files or similar to set up nymea.

How does it work?

Nymea consists of 3 main parts, nymea:core, nymea:app and nymea:cloud. nymea:core can be installed in your home, for example on a Raspberry Pi or on any other Linux machine/VM. You may also just it as a MQTT broker or self hosted "if this than that" instance in the cloud. It's the core piece of nymea and manages "things". nymea:app runs on your phone, or PC, or perhaps on the same machine as your nymea:core and is the user interface for nymea. nymea:cloud offers additional cloud centric features which are completely optional and not required to operate Tasmota devices with nymea so I'll leave them aside for now. For more information on nymea, please check out the nymea website at https://nymea.io and especially the wiki at https://wiki.nymea.io for installation instructions and howtos.

How do Tasmota devices connect to nymea?

My suggestion is to install nymea:core on a Raspberry Pi and nymea:app on your phone. If your Tasmota devices are already in the same network, all you have to do is to go to the "Thing" wizard and add your Tasmota devices. There is no need to set up an MQTT server or configure things manually. All you need is to provide nymea with your Tasmota device's IP address and it will take care of the rest. It will configure the device via the web interface and make it connect to the nymea internal MQTT broker and just make it work magically.

At this point there is one more thing to consider. The Tasmota device support is very new and only supported as of version 0.10 of nymea:core. The Raspberry Pi images do not have that included just yet, so for the moment you'd need to "sudo apt-get update" and "sudo apt-get dist-upgrade" the RPi image to get the latest version.

As I said before, I only had the chance to test it with Sonoff T1 2CH modules so please, if you have more Tasmota devices, test it with them and report back to me so I can fix things. For general issues with or questions about nymea, there is also a forum at forum.nymea.io, for Tasmota related feedback I'm happy to receive that here as well :)

Enjoy and thanks for any feedback you might have!