Hi all. As promised here are my findings regarding the Brett Sheleski Sonoff handler using the Tasmota firmware. I have been discussing this with Brett over the last few days. Basically here is what you have to do.
Follow the implementation instructions as described here https://github.com/BrettSheleski/SmartThingsPublic/tree/master/devicetypes/BrettSheleski/tasmota.src
But something which is not clear is that you only need to add one Device that being for the Tasmota Device Handler, you don’t need to add a device for the Tasmota-Power Device Handler because once the handler starts working it will spawn the children buttons.
But here is where it gets a bit screwy. When I first installed it, the Tasmota Device turned up in my Smartthings app with all null values. I pressed refresh 6 or 7 times, but there was no change. It didn’t even show up in the log window which was unusual. After chatting to Brett, he suggested that I only use the IP address in the properties without any header or trailing slashes (http://) I also used the username admin and password that I configured in the configure other option of the Tasmota Firmware.
Once you have values appearing in the app the next thing you have to do it go back into the “My Device Handlers” and then I select the Tasmota handler to enter into the code window. I then select the Simulator option in the top right-hand corner of the IDE. Set my Home location, Selected the device as virtual and hit install. This will cause the Tasmota handler to spawn its children (it should not be this way but it is. Brett is looking into it).
But I am pretty unimpressed at the performance. It’s very slow and Brett told me that if the device has a state change triggered by something else other than Smarthings then Smarthings won’t know about it. He is working on a Node-Red implementation with an app to solve this. But this got me thinking, perhaps we are going about this in an overly complicated manner.
The Tasmotta Firmware is very highly geared towards MQTT so why fight that. I have Node-Red running in my environment and I can pretty esily install an MQTT broker to integrate Node-Red to the Tasmota. Then what I am going to attempt to do it is get SmartThings to talk to Node-Red via Webservices to triger an MQTT event. This solution should also work with Home Assitant as well given that a lot of HA users also use Node red because the Automation is pretty clunky in HA. If it works I will share with the world. If it dosnt I will disappear into obscurity.
I will let you know how it goes.