Implementation and Design of Physical/Digital Switches Modified from Sonoff Product Based on Internet of Things

Abstract

While more home appliances are designed and manufactured, Sonoff serial home assistant alliances are designed and manufactured by eWeLink for many cheap and convenient devices controlled with exclusive APPs. Sonoff home assistant alliances are popular and well-known to attract many developers who can develop unofficial software to enhance the closed APPs designed by eWeLink and make flexible applications based on original hardware such as Tasmota and parameterized open-source APPs. We follow the above-mentioned developers to design a firmware that controls and is controlled based on message queue telemetry transport (MQTT) protocol from a cloud platform and the internet of thing (IoT) based architecture. The Sonoff home assistant alliances installed by the designed firmware can be controlled with one or more groups through a clouding platform by existing physical power-sockets from one-to-one controlling by eWeLink APPs. Under the proposed architecture, those Sonoff serial home assistant alliances are easily used like traditional power sockets for old-age users, who only use physical switches with touch-panel with MCU-based controllers to control power sockets. We designed digital switches on the website by browsers and physical touch panels as traditional switches work independently and coexist to meet most users with software-based APPs. The proposed architecture can be implemented and deployed as a proof of concept (PoC) for the usability and validity.