“ITEAD Studio Sonoff family is comprised of various inexpensive ESP8266 WiFi power switch, and the company sent me two of their latest CE certified models with Sonoff TH16 + external temperature & humidity probe, and Sonoff POW to measure power consumption. I checked the hardware is the first part of the review, and used Sonoff TH16 to control a water pump with the stock firmware and Ewelink Android app in the second part. It works reasonably well, but it relies on the cloud, so if you lose your Internet connection or the service closed, you can’t control the relay manually anymore. Luckily, the UART pins are exposed on Sonoff switches so you can solder a 4-pin header and connect a USB to TTL to flash your own firmware.
Please don’t connect Sonoff devices to the mains when programming them, it’s very dangerous, instead the USB to TTL board will power the system, and will allow you to program the board safely. Later you’ll be able to update the firmware, if needed, over the network.
The next step is to select the firmware you want to use, and I’ve been advised two firmware for ESP8266, namely ESPurna specifically designed for Sonoff devices, and ESPEasy with a larger community of users. The latter may be usable to control the relay, but it has yet to support HLW8012 chip used to measure power consumption in Sonoff POW, so I decided to go with ESPurna.”