Using Kogan SmarterHome Plug

I’m in Australia, and I’ve recently purchased some Kogan SmarterHome Plugs (with energy meters). The plug is based on the ESP chipset as far as I can tell. I have successfully download the mobile phone based Kogan configuration application from the app store and configured a switch to work - so I can turn the switch on and off with the application - great.

Now, to get the Kogan to work with my OpenHAB setup.

I currently have a bunch of Belkin WeMo, tp-link Smart WiFi Plug, and Philips Hue lamps working quite nicely with my Raspberry Pi based OpenHAB setup.

Searching the web doesn’t appear to give any insight into the configuration of the Kogan switches. I expect it’s some kind of rebranded switch from another manufacturer. I’ve looked for something suitable in the OpenHAB add-ons but need a bit of guidance.

I can see the switch connected to my WiFi router with the name ‘ESP_38A02C’. The phone app indicates an IP (WAN) address for the switch which is just my broadband route address.

Does anybody know how I can control these switches with OpenHAB?

Cheers, S t u a r t .

No others numbers, or model information written on it so people can work out the original?

Jaycar used to sell a smart switch, but have discontinued. Not sure if it would be similar.

Tuya might be what you’re after…and it’s possible (if you look up the hook up on youtube) that you can flash tasmota on it.

Hey, psyciknz, thanks for the replies. This looks really interesting. I’ll have a closer look and report back here on how I go.

Thanks, again, much appreciated.

Cheers, S t u a r t .

Keen to see where you get, @s5b

Time for an update. I’ve done a lot of reading based on the link sent by psycilnz, thanks again.

As far as I can tell, the Kogan switch is a rebadged Tuya switch - but I don’t know which one. These switches are based on the ESP modules. My hunting on the Internet turned up the following links:

This is a general discussion about changing the software on the switch:

This video, in turn lead me to this walk-through video:

And these instructions:

http://www.thesmarthomehookup.com/tuya-convert-walk-through-february-2019/

I bought another Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, and a 16 GByte microSDHC card for this project. And I followed the instructions in the walk-through video.

FYI: I built the Pi with Rasbian Stretch Lite, as recommended. I did this on a Mac. To get the image to mount on the Mac to create the ssh file, I installed osxfuse, using brew.

I elected to install the Tasmota software.

After a bit of fiddling around with the wifi connection, I could connect to the web interface on the Kogan switch. So far, so good.

The interesting part comes next in that the Tasmota software needs to be configured to the arrangement of the pins on the ESP. I started to do this by trial and error on the “Generic (0)” and was having some success in getting some parts of the switch to respond.

Perhaps foolishly, I made the mistake of trying some of the other configurations other than “Generic (0)”. When changing configurations, the switch reboots and the web interface restarts. My most recent configuration change has had the switch restart, but the web interface did not restart. And now I have an unresponsive switch with a flashing LED. :anguished:

I’ll do a bit more research, but I think I may have bricked this switch.

I’ll report back as I find out more information.

Cheers, S t u a r t .

Arrgh, Stu! I was getting so excited!

I’m in Auckland and also bought a few lights and plugs from Kogan. They work fine with the Kogan SmarterHome app linked up to Google Home, but I thought I’d hit pay dirt when I saw you post about getting them recognised by OpenHab.

Did you manage to make any progress since 22 March, or are you firmly bricked?

Brian

Hi, Brain

Thanks for being in touch.

I was making some good progress, but it was very trial and error. I’m a software guy, not a hardware guy.

I got to the point where I had flashed the controller. But, then there were a whole bunch (many, many combinations) of configuration options to try to get the device to react in an expected way to the inputs.

By selecting and trialling different configuration options I could see that it would change, say, the status light, or switch the power. I didn’t find a configuration that gave me all of the functionality I was after.

And then, … I selected a configuration option that appears to be incompatible with the switch and it seems to have bricked the device. The device now sits flashing its light indicating its looking for a network connection but it doesn’t seem to ever find it.

I’ve thought about sacrificing another switch and trying again, and I probably will do that, but I’ve been distracted by other (health) issues.

I think it can be done. It’s just (just!) a matter of working out the configuration of the hardware inside the Kogan switch. The initial setup went well and as expected from the videos and links from my earlier post. I just stumbled at the end.

Happy to answer any other questions. And keen to see how you go if you decide to follow suit.

Cheers, S t u a r t .

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At a guess, you may be able to pull one of the other pins to ground and reflash like some other ESP based boards.

thank you for contributing and welcome to the OpenHAB community Glen!

So sorry for the very long delay in responding…

I can’t really affect the hardware without pulling the sealed device apart, which I think may be hard to do - to get it back together again. The device looks like this:

koganSwitch

I may sacrifice one of the devices to have a look inside. Especially since I can’t seem to resurrect it via software alone.

Thanks very much for your reply.

Cheers, S t u a r t .