XBMCNut

For as long as I've been playing with home automation, I've wanted a straight forward low-cost solution for replacing standard light switches. Although I have several Z-wave dimmers and Aeon Labs touch panels, these work out to be $180 NZD each! At least in NZ, the common 2-way and 3-way light circuits have the mains coming in on one switch and the load connected to another. The two switches are connected together as shown below.

You can completely remove the low voltage board and connect as shown below. GPIO0 needs to be pulled to ground on power up (it can be left grounded during flashing) to enter programming mode. Power the device from your FTDI programmer set to 3.3V . The Sonoff Touch is a nice glass touch panel based on an ESP 8285 with 1MB of integrated flash that can be quite easily flashed with a self compiled version of ESP Easy.  You need to compile yourself as the builds available online are all made for the ESP8266 and will not work with the Sonoff Touch.

Preface: I've just started playing around with Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi and exploring the world of MQTT to control devices on the network. Learning curve is a bit steep but worth the effort as MQTT is very fast. The hardware and software tools I'm using are as follows: 2 x Sonoff relay units 2 x NodeMCU Boards ESPEasy firmware (must be version 121 or above as that contains the MQTT 'retain' flag option. Home Assistant software on Raspberry Pi2 MQTT Test Software: PC: MQTT.fx Android: MQTT Dashboard