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Sonoff & MQTT Example (Lounge Light)

A while back I got brave and changed the firmware on the Sonoff switch connected to my lounge light to use it in my home automation. I followed these instructions when uploading the firmware and was up and running in about 10 minutes.

Once I had everything connected back up it was time to interact with the light via my MQTT broker, and after Googling for the relevant commands I found them here.

Which I have tabulated below:

CommandPayloadResponse 
cmnd/my_device/power<empty>stat/my_device/POWER ONOFF
cmnd/my_device/poweronstat/my_device/POWER ON 
cmnd/my_device/poweroffstat/my_device/POWER OFF 

Once I knew the correct commands to send to the device I just needed to configure a unique name for it using the configuration menu provided by the Tasmota firmware. As you can see below my device’s name is loungeLight.

The sonoff will listen to events published on the %prefix%/loungeLight/ topic, so in the case of sending a power on command to the light that would be cmnd/loungeLight/power. Knowing this I created the following flow in Node-RED.

This flow will publish a pre-defined payload to the below topic on my MQTT broker, which in this case will either be on or off depending on which button was pressed (or the value published by the scheduler).

To take my light automation to the next level as it were I am making use of schedex:

Scheduler for node-red which allows you to enter on/off times as 24hr clock (e.g. 01:10) or suncalc events (e.g. goldenHour). It also allows you to offset times and randomise the time within the offset.

This scheduler allows you to set your location (longitude and latitude) and provides some really awesome scheduling options as shown below.

This allows me to make use of the sunsetStart time to turn ON my light…

… and the sunrise time to turn it back OFF.

My lounge light is now fully automated thanks to Node-RED, Tasmota, schedexand a simple Sonoff switch!

I hope that you found this post helpful and as always I welcome any comments or feedback in the discussion section below.

This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.

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