Developer Andrew Andrianov has designed just a little accent which goals to make the majority flashing of low-cost off-the-shelf good energy sockets rather less painful, by offering a pogo-pin connector for the machine’s debug port.

“The issue flashing these modules on bulk is – you need to disassemble and solder the results in the sting connector,” Andrianov explains in a weblog put up dropped at our consideration by Adafruit, referring to Beken BK7231N modules present in low-cost off-the-shelf good energy sockets. “It is okay for a one-time solder job, however is a completely no-go when you need to do it in bulk. So, I scratched my head, fired up SolveSpace and after some trial and error made this weird-looking machine.”

That “weird-looking machine” is a intelligent 3D-printed clip, designed to carry spring-loaded pogo pins. Whereas the onerous work on determining the way to substitute the inventory firmware with a model appropriate with House Assistant has already been achieved, the brand new firmware nonetheless must be loaded onto every module in flip — a job which normally requires soldering a programming header in place.

“No soldering,” Andrianov says of his quicker different for processing the plugs as rapidly as doable. “Simply connect it and take away as soon as you might be achieved. I received’t do a full writeup of hacking the firmware. Appears there are lots of people which have invested a whole lot of time to make these working. The one related particulars listed below are: they’re additionally flashed by way of serial port, very like the ESP8266, they’ve OpenBeken firmware, that appears very like Tasmota, and [an] ESPHome fork that needs to be merged fairly quickly to ESPHome grasp.”

Andrianov’s full write-up is obtainable on his web site, whereas the clip itself has been revealed to Thingiverse beneath a Inventive Commons Attribution license.