Hi and first of all welcome to my blog!

My first post on this blog will be about the SonOff Wireless Switch I recently bought trough BangGood.

For a long time I had the urge to start automating some stuff at home, (I still live with my parents so it is to some extent that I can automate stuff without them getting annoyed ;)) I wanted to start doing this because I heard that a colleague of mine had automated many things at his house such as the lights turn on at sundown, his blinds close, his AC turns on when it is too hot inside, his heater turns on when it is too cold etc.etc.. This got me wanting to do the same thing! So when I got home I started doing some research and found out that in general it is pretty expensive unless you have much knowledge of programming and stuff, I don't at all haha.

After doing some more research I found the SonOff brand and all of its awesome products. Looked at a few videos and was convinced that this was going to be my way to get into home automation at a good price. I settled for the SonOff Wireless Switch which works on WiFi.

Decided to buy 3 at a time because I was sure that I would be able to use them all at some point. Banggood had a good deal when I bought 3 so at a total of €12.72 they were sent via mail to my house. It took about 3 weeks for them to arrive and I decided to jump straight in when I received them.

For initial testing purpose I will be using the stock SonOff Firmware. Custom Firmware in a later post.

As expected it came nicely wrapped in some plastic. And it had a SonOff branded cardboard box around it.

When opening the box you are greeted by the

SonOff Wireless Switch, a little bag of screws to screw in the plates and a Service Check paper.









As shown above, it has an input and output side both labeled with N and L. In the EU blue is N and brown is L. If you are not sure what is what in your country look it up, it is pretty basic. As seen in the picture above there is also a button located on the device which we will explain when we get into the setup of the device.





As shown after removing the caps you will see the green connector box, twist the screws as far up as possible and put the correct cables in and twist the screw back. Ones that is done put the caps over the socket and you are good to go!





It will end up looking something like this without the cables in there.





I ended grabbing a powerstrip and cutting it in half and putting the SonOff box between the cables. This way I can control 3 lights in my living room all at ones. The powerstrip I used has a ground cable running through it as well. Sadly the SonOff does not have a ground connection so I ended up routing it passed the SonOff. This works as well.





Put your device in the wall outlet and it should start flashing a green light on the SonOff. Next up download the EWELink app for your device.







For IOS Click For Android click here For IOS Click here

E-WeLink App / Installation





First off you need to create an account at E-WeLink. As you can see I had a great start. The EU EWE-Link server was not reachable so I had to wait until the next day.

Next day I was finally able to create an account. After you have created your account and have logged in you will be greeted by the screen above. Hit the blue plus button at the bottom so you can add a new device.

Depending on the device that you are using click the appropriate button. Mine is the first option. I had to hold the only button that is on the SonOff Switch in for 5 seconds. After 5 seconds the green LED will start flashing faster. After that hit the next button in the app.

Here you will have to fill in your 2.4GHz network information. Be sure that it is set on 2.4GHz and not 5GHz. Hit remember password and hit next.

It should automatically connect to your network and copy the settings to your SonOff device.

Yes! You did it! You can now control your Lamp or Powerstrip trough WiFi with the E-WeLink app. Talking about the E-WeLink app here is a quick inside. The app in general works okay. The response is not the quickest compared to the SonOff running custom firmware with MQTT (More on that later) but it does the job alright.

You can even set it up with a timer as I have done above. The light will go on at 19:10 and will turn off at 01:00. So this works alright. Not too much to add to that.

Conclusion

The main question that comes to mind is should you spend your 5 bucks on this cheap way to automate your lighting? My answer is Yes for sure. It is by far one of the cheapest ways to achieve light automation out there. Especially paired with different firmware it will make it even more worth your money.