Flashing an Eco Plugs chip

[joel gerardi]

It is my understanding that this chip is actually an esp.  See pic below.  It is in an outdoor relay box witch i want to use for a pool pump.  I would like to flash it with tasmota.

I am currently at a vacation house and dont have everything i need to do this.  I have a USB to RS232 ftdi serial converter.  My question is can i use this to flash the chip.  According to the pinout, the rs232 end does not have 3v or 5v pins.  Only ground and tx and rx.

What im hoping is that i can power the relay box from its own power source and when i power it up, ground the GPIO0 pin to get it in to flashing mode and then simply use the USB to RS232 to connect to the tx and rx.

Will this work when the data is coming from one source and the power from another.

Thoughts

[Justin Adie]

How is the relay box powered?

If from the mains then definitely don't hook up anything from the relay box to anything else.  The dc ground will be floating and almost certainly nowhere near 0v.  Danger danger Will Robinson!

I'd hook up a usb +ve 5v supply to that LDO and go from there.  You'll need a soldering iron to do the temporary connections.  And short gpio0 to find with a soldered wire too.  Makes things much easier.  

One other gotcha - relays should be rated for inductive loads like motors if you're going to use them for that purpose.  The average DC relay is intended for mainly resistive loads.   Inductive load relays are called motor relays often and come with a horsepower rating.  

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[Philip Knowles]

The pinouts are on this page (and look to be the same as yours)

Wi-Fi Module Pinouts - Tasmota

Do NOT attempt to use mains to power the device - you can fry your PC or yourself.

It's unusual for an FTDI device not to have either 3.3V or 5V - it maybe your device is working at RS232 levels not TTL levels. The best thing  to do is to use 3 x AA batteries to power the chip and connect the grounds together

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From: sonof...@googlegroups.com <sonof...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of joel gerardi <joelg...@gmail.com>
Sent: 25 May 2024 17:11
To: TasmotaUsers <sonof...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Flashing an Eco Plugs chip

 

[Erix]

Hi Joel,

that will help if you told us on which equipment you did find this little board.

do you have a MAC addr ? I am not a specialist on ESP but I have listen a lot of time to not connect at the same time the tx/rx/vcc

AND the power of the device itself..

The thing I would try myself if I had this little friend between my fingers is to plug it to my USB port and a FTDI adapter and I would play

with esptools and do some "infos" to see first if I can make contact with it.

Esptools can be very helpful sometimes it helps to "break the ice"between us and these little thing..

Hope it helps a bit

Regards