Category: Gadgets

OpenBeken with Globe Electric Smart Plugs

I needed some more home automation friendly outlets, and my preferred Sonoff S31 outlets are hard to get at the moment. It also seems that the S40 has been released as a replacement, but moves away from the ESP micro-controller. This got me looking for what I could get locally.

The Home Depot carries the Defiant series, which when I looked up the details on the FCC website it seemed like a great candidate having an ESP32 inside. However, it seems that the eFuse has been flipped to prevent any further firmware updates. I then moved on and found a sale price of $22.99 for a 3 pack of the Globe Electric Smart Plugs.

Now these plugs do not have an ESP device in them, but a WB2S module. Some folks take advantage of the fact that this is pin compatible with an ESP device and will just swap in a whole new logic board. However, you can also use OpenBeken which I’ve done before. Since these were pretty cheap I picked up 3 boxes (9 plugs).

These plugs are fairly compact and you can fit two in an outlet (top and bottom) if you wanted.

The first thing we need to do is open these. This is fairly easily done using a pocket knife and a little bit of patience / prying. After doing a few of these I got pretty quick, a minute or two to open them. I captured a short video I put up on YouTube showing this process.

Now that it’s open, you can remove the exterior case entirely and you have access to the internals. The micro-controller was easy to spot, it is on it’s own tiny circuit board.

You can see why some folks are simply removing the entire controller board and swapping in a compatible one with a more friendly chip to program. However, with OpenBeken we have the option of reprogramming this chip with some firmware to give us local only control (via Home Assistant).

At the top you can see this is a WB2S board, and the chip is a BK7231TQN32. For the most part this chip is referred to as a BK7231T.

We’re going to need to hook up 4 wires to this to reprogram it, 3.3V, GND, Tx and Rx. Let’s figure out where those pins are.

This is the other side of the board, and if you look carefully you can see at the bottom edge we have starting from the left side BAT, GND, IRX, ITX. These are the 4 pins we need to connect with. Thankfully we can access each of these from the bottom side of the board as the controller board slots into the main circuit board on it’s edge.

Not very pretty, but it gets the job done. The wires are from some stripped ethernet cable and I think they are 26AWG – fairly small. While this was convenient for me to connect some wires to, upon inspection it seems the only reason there is any solder here is to support the board-to-board connection, I’m pretty sure all of the actual interfacing to the circuits is on the other side.

Someone on the Elektroda forum seems to have done the first work on one of these plugs. A lot of people using OpenBeken have used the CloudCutter project to reprogram things without wiring anything up, but this seemed more complicated to me and not guaranteed to work with all devices.

My first attempt I used the same software as I had previously. The only change was to download a different firmware because this is a different module. Unfortunately I goofed somewhere and when flashing the device it failed, then it was no longer responsive to my attempts to connect via serial at all. It may be a brick now, boo.

For my second attempt, I did more reading about the ESPHome support for BK72xx chips. There is quite detailed information about flashing the chips, and it seems to strongly recommend you do not use the old tool I had previously used. There is also a section there on un-bricking things which I’ll have to try later.

Thus I picked the ltchiptool – and installed it under Windows. The easy way to do this on Windows was use the Microsoft Store to install “Python 3.10” – then run pip install ltchiptool[gui]

Once installed, you can launch the GUI with python -m ltchiptool gui

While I may eventually end up using ESPHome, I decided to stick with OpenBeken and grabbed the latest OpenBK7231T_UA_1.17.800.bin from their download page. I first used the ltchiptool to download the existing flash image to confirm my wiring was working. Then I held my breath and uploaded the firmware.. and it worked.

Then it was a simple matter of repeating things. Crack open the case. Solder some wires. Hook it up to ltchiptool, download to confirm things are working, upload new firmware. De-solder the wires. Re-assemble. Now I had 8 outlets reprogrammed.

A dab of crazy glue helped re-seal the exterior cases. So far this seems just fine after a few insert / removals of the plugs.

Next we need to do some configuration. Upon first boot the device will offer up a captive portal. Connect your computer to the “OpenBK76231N_XXXXX” WiFi and visit http://192.168.4.1 in a browser. From here we can pick “Config” then “Configure Wifi & Web” to setup the Wifi connection.

Once the device is on our WiFi network, it can then see the internet which allows us to use the “Web Application” to further configure the device. You can launch the Web Application from the main landing page. I did find that it was important to access the device via IP address (ie: http://192.168.1.56) vs. by name.

Once we launch the Web Application, we can easily configure the device by using the “Config” tab, and searching for the right template from the web. I have to say this is a pretty clever way to do things.

You can see I’ve searched up the “Globe Globe smart plug” and have used “Copy Device Settings” to populate the “Pin Settings”. At the bottom of the page there is a “Save” button to persist the choice. Now if we revisit the Home page we will see the device now offers up control of the power. The button on the side of the plug also now works to toggle power.

The last thing we’ll do is connect this up to Home Assistant. The easy path here is to setup MQTT (Config->Configure MQTT) and get connect to your broker. I was left scratching my head why Home Assistant wouldn’t see these new devices – and after a lot of probing around my MQTT setup and verifying that data was flowing, I finally watched the video the explains it.

Short story was – after you’ve got MQTT setup, and the main page will show you the MQTT State is connected – you need to do one more thing to have it emit a discovery payload to Home Assistant. (Config->Home Assistant Configuration) and hit “Start Home Assistant Discovery”. Then the devices just appeared with their short name in Home Assistant.

New Thermostat – Ecobee Lite 3

I’ve had my eye on the Ecobee 3 Lite for a while. My previous thermostat was starting to show it’s age. The cloud service had been discontinued, but it still worked well with Home Assistant. However, recently it started to be colder at home than was comfortable – this turned out to be the fact that the temperature was set 2 degrees lower than the schedule?! Sure I could have worked around this, but when you can’t trust the device to do what it is supposed to do – time for a change.

I was able to get a used Ecobee 3 Lite pretty much new in box for $60 from someone locally. This is a good price, but I’ve seen it as low as $50, but often higher. Keep in mind the new price is currently only $179.99, so it is a reasonable cost even new.

The Ecobee comes with a white plastic shield you can use to cover up any unsightly holes left in the wall from the previous thermostat. As my drywall patching skills are finally getting to an acceptable level, I opted for a ‘clean’ install and patched and painted the mounting damage.

Since I’d already sorted out the whole C-wire thing for the previous smart thermostat, it was just a matter of removing the old one – and installing the new Ecobee. Included with the Ecobee is a magic box that will let you fix your missing C-wire problems, it is involved and you have to mess with the wiring in your furnace but at least they have a solution.

Here is a photo of my existing wiring.

I’ve got C, W, Y, Rh and G. Following along with the installation manual, it’s easy to map this over to the Ecobee wiring harness.

The old -> new wiring

  • Rh -> Rc
  • G -> G
  • Y -> Y1
  • W -> W1
  • C -> C

Once this is done, you just snap the thermostat in place. I thought it was pretty cool that it detects the wiring setup and confirms as part of the first start experience.

This is a good way to confirm that you’ve got at least good connections to each of the wires on the back plate.

Next up it’ll send you off to download the app and sign up for an account with Ecobee. For now I’m using the ‘cloud’ service but I will say that I wasn’t a huge fan of how much information it wants to gather about your location, size of house, number of people in the house. I can rationalize why they might use that information to provide a better experienced – but we are talking about just a thermostat that is going to turn your HVAC system on and off. It does sound like you can disable it’s internet connectivity and run with just local and you can get by fine.

I do have it integrated with Home Assistant. It seems that Ecobee is no longer offering the ability to create new API keys so the only way to connect is via the HomeKit integration. HomeKit really wants to use mDNS to discover things, and running HomeAssistant (HA) inside of a docker container can make this tricky. Most solutions suggest you run the container using the host networking mode --network:host, but I opted to give my HA a macvlan IP address.

I probably should have done this a while back. Suddenly my HA install was able to find all sorts of compatible devices on my network. The Roku Ultra, the HD Homerun, my printer, and the Sonos speakers. While I was able to make all of these integrations work previously the auto-discovery wasn’t happening.

I was able to easily integrate via HomeKit without any Apple devices in the mix. From the thermostat itself you can enable HomeKit integration, then just use the 8 digit value from the screen to connect to the HA integration.

Of course, many of my IoT devices also live on an isolated network, and I haven’t quite figured out how to get the mDNS reflection stuff to work yet. Hopefully at one point I’ll get there, and maybe that will let me shift the thermostat and Sonos speakers to the IoT network as well.

It’s been a couple of days, and the Ecobee has been working fine. It’s integrated into Home Assistant via HomeKit and as a bonus I now get both temperature and humidity readings from the thermostat. It also look pretty nice on the wall – and no more surprise cold wake ups. The thermostat user interface is touch screen and feels pretty intuitive.

 

Google Pixel 7

The Pixel 4a was a fantastic phone for me. I bought it new from Google back in the fall of 2020 when it was a current model. The end of support date snuck up on me, had it already been 3 years? I noticed in October I hadn’t had a reboot (and thus a security patch) in quite some time. The 4a had a surprise extra update in November – but this was clearly the end of the line.

The 4a was a change for me, for the most part I’d bought gently used phones at around the $200 price point that were 2-3 years old, and then used them for a year and a bit. This gave me a new toy regularly, and was fairly cost effective. Still, I was probably spending about $500 over 3 years easily -this helped me justify the purchase of a new 4a. Little did I know how much I’d enjoy having the 4a and not doing the upgrade dance regularly.

In the first weeks of 2024, my Pixel 4a was still performing well. I’d generally only need to charge it every second day. Yes, over time the battery had gotten a little worse – but not by much. The camera continued to be amazing. And wrapped in a bumper case and screen protector the phone itself was in mint condition. If it was still getting regular security patches from Google I’d have no problem continuing to use it.

Of course, LineageOS is an option. Migrating to this would give me a community supported version of Android 13. A few worries kept from from this path. I use my phone for work, and have the mobile device management stuff installed, I wasn’t convinced this would work smoothly with LineageOS.. but it has in the past (honestly I think I was looking for reasons to upgrade). The migration of apps also seemed daunting. While most things have a ‘cloud’ story and are linked to various accounts etc, some of the games I have don’t have a backup/restore story. The other pain is the lack of SafetyNet support, practically this means only Netflix won’t work for me (again, I’m looking for an excuse).

Honestly, looking back, if I’d gone through the migration effort and moved to LineageOS it would have all worked out. I would have had my security updates but been stuck back on Android 13. The work device policy is good with support for devices back to Android 12 currently. There is also a good chance the WorkProfile is still properly supported in LineageOS (it was in the past). I would have lost state in a few games, but that is minor.

Post Black Friday and leading into Christmas and Boxing week there were some crazy sales on mobile plans in Canada. CostCo was apparently offering a plan that was very low and provided a Pixel 7 on a 2 year contract for $1/mo. This has the result of many BNIB phones showing up on the local used market.

The Pixel 7 still lists for $799 directly from Google. Many of the used market phones where listing between $350-$500 still with the security seal in place. Relative to Google the local pricing is lower for a BNIB or refurbished options from retail stores.

I found someone listing one for $300, and it check out as legit. He’d done a plan upgrade/renew back in October gotten a new Pixel 7 but already had one, so he had this sealed BNIB one to sell. I suspect he’d started at a much higher price, but the recent glut of new phones on the used market pushed his price down. There were other similar phones for $330 to be had. This price point made getting a phone upgrade a smart move for me as it still has 3+ years of support from Google.

There are plenty of phone comparison sites, but let me run down things that I see as trade offs.

  • I’ll probably miss the back fingerprint sensor, the in screen optical one is “ok” but not nearly as reliable.
  • The 4a has a 3.5mm headphone jack, this is a useful way to interrupt bluetooth connectivity nonsense with my car/ bluetooth headphones. I can use a USB-C adapter, but it’s not the same.
  • The Pixel 7 is bigger, there are pros and cons to a larger phone.
  • As stated above, the Pixel 7 is still currently supported. This is a big win.
  • The camera is better in the Pixel 7, but the 4a certainly held it’s own. Very minor difference.

The Pixel 7 is a very pretty phone, I’m not a fan of the all glass back, but it is very sexy. Of course, the first thing is to buy a case and screen protector before I even take it out of the box. I grabbed a case very similar to the one I’ve had on my 4a from Amazon. I headed to eBay to get a screen protector from a seller I’ve used previously. This meant a few day wait, but that wasn’t a big deal.

All good – now it’s wrapped and ready to roll. The bumper case has these nice extended corners which add protection, but also give you something to grip onto. There is a subtle roughness on the sides too, making the phone less slick. The screen protector doesn’t have any cut-outs for the camera, this is similar to the one I had on my 4a and it had no negative impact for my use.

The phones are significantly different in size, with the Pixel 4a on the left and the Pixel 7 on the right. I’ll point at a comparison article if you want to look at the specifications side by side. I was interested in the in pocket weight, including the case. The 4a is 175g vs the 7 at 231g – yikes, 32% heavier. This is enough that you notice the difference, but I’ve gotten use to the added heft and size.

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