Tasmota is an alternative firmware for ESP8266 based devices like iTead Sonoff, offering web and OTA (Over The Air) firmware updates and sensors support, which can be controlled under Http, Serial, MQTT and KNX, allowing for an easy integration with Smart Home Systems.
It is written for Arduino IDE and PlatformIO and the project was officially started in January 2017 by Theo Arends. The name Tasmota stands for Theo-Arends-Sonoff-MQTT-OTA.
Altough Sonoff-Tasmota was originally built to replace stock firmware on Iteads Sonoff devices, it currently supports a large number of ESP8266 based boards with a multitude of sensors that are not necessarily found on Sonoff products only.
Here are some of the main advantages of the Sonoff-Tasmota software to consider:
- MQTT protocol support
- HTTP request support
- full local network compatibility
- supports most common sensors
- Allows the utilization of extra GPIO pins
- OTA updates
- Timers
The community developed to be very active and supporting, there are a lot of materials you can find to use for your projects, lots of Youtube tutorials and plenty of well written wiki pages. For full details and a complete list of supported devices and sensors please check out the official GitHub page.
If you are starting out and wish to have a relatively easy experience in developing your projects, Tasmota is ideal to use because it makes it quite easy to configure your devices once the firmware is installed, you can simply find your device on your local network and then access its web-based GUI to configure all that is needed.
