Sonoff T1

Peter Scargillsonoff, Sonoff T154 Comments on Sonoff T1

Sonoff T1[5]The Sonoff T1 is described as a Luxury Glass Panel Touch Wall Switch” – and indeed looking at mine – it looks very nice indeed.

The wall switch comes in three varieties with 1 touch area (and one output) up to 3 touch areas (and 3 outputs).

There’s a full spec here so I won’t go too deeply into this. The T1 can be controlled via Itead’s own app using WIFI and also you can control it with Amazon Alexa, Nest and Google Home…  but probably of more interest to some readers here, being ESP8266-based, it can be re-flashed to run the Tasmota software which means of course, simple remote control via MQTT.  The unit can also be controlled by 433Mhz radio remote control.

The front of this switch is made from toughened glass and so should be good for a long life. Output is 2 amps per gang max – which in 21st century should be more than enough for most lighting.

So – a good gadget but a couple of things you should be aware of: The front panel is smooth glass, which means it gives no feedback as to where the touch surfaces are – so someone with visual issues might have problems with the 2 or 3-gang version of this.  Also – like some other electronic switches, this unit needs a NEUTRAL wire and in some UK installations this may not be available if you are simply replacing an existing wall switch. If it’s a new installation of course you can just make a neutral available  – but you should be aware of this.

The company asked me to mention this after I wrote to them to point out the neutral issue… they have put a warning on their website.

So – if the price is right, you have a neutral available and visual issues are not a concern then this probably is very good! Knowing Sonoff – the price will be right. They are cheap enough at just over £12 but postage as always will be important.

54 thoughts on “Sonoff T1”

  1. easily done, take the glass plate off and place a thick piece of tape

  2. I’m wondering if there is a way to stop the flashy wifi led without tasmota? is it possible to stick a white sticker behind the glass?
    I haven’t purchased yet, but been looking for somewhere that sells pre-flashed versions and can’t find any UK ones 🙁

    1. easily done, take the glass plate off and place a thick piece of tape

  3. Touch sensor LED is ON when the relay is ON . But it is nonsense, it’s impossible to see LED status when is light in the room.
    In my opinion touch sensor LED should be ON in the darkness, it would be easy to find it.

    How is going with this LED status in tasmota? is it possible to have it in opposite way of main relay status?

      1. Doesn’t work like that. The LED is hardwired to the relay. If you follow the LED trace, it goes from VCC>RESISTOR>LED>pin on a small chip. Cut the trace leading from the LED to the small chip, and wire that to the small mosfet capacitors on the bottom right of the board. The right mosfet is SW1, middle is SW2, and left is SW3.

        The LED will behave inverted then.

  4. How deep does the wall back box need to be for a Sonoff T1 (UK version) ?

    The sonoff website says the overall depth of a Sonoff T1 (UK version) is 32mm, but what looks between 5-10mm protrudes from the wall, meaning actually depth required is really somewhere between 22-27mm.

    Can someone give me and exact figure?

    Thanks in advance.

    1. Dave, I can’t give you the dimension from the rear of the fascia plate to the back of the Sonoff but I doubt it would fit in a standard 25 mm back box and leave any room for the wires. I think you would need a 35 mm back box to get the unit in without trapping / crushing the wires and to be safe.

      1. Thanks for the quick reply Bob.

        My living room back boxes are 25mm but my cables (live, switched live, neutral and earth) are all run inside conduit so any excess cable can be pushed up inside the conduit and out of the back box area, so I might just get away with them.

        Our bedroom back boxes are a different matter though (only 16mm deep), so I will need to make them deeper at some point, in meantime I could always add some of these 10mm spacers (there are places on ebay selling 7mm thick versions and 20mm thick versions). They will probably spoil the look of the switch but as a temporary solution or until sonoff come up with a much thinner/more compact design, they will do the job.

        https://www.screwfix.com/p/schneider-electric-lisse-1-gang-spacer-white/5782j

        Cheers

        1. Dave, one of the things I like about Peter’s blog is the sharing of information. I wasn’t aware of the switch spacers. Another way to get 2 or 3 mm would be to fit those finger plates designed for light switches, intended mainly to keep the wall clean around light switches.

          1. I found that my existing switch only had a 10mm back box and the rear of the T1 switch sticks out 25mm. My solution was to use 2 of the Screwfix spacers – not the most elegant but it will do for now. BTW, I also only had Live (Red) and switched Live (Black) in my switch wiring. To get around this, I reconnected the Black wire to the Neutral in the ceiling rose so that the Sonoff T1 is fully powered. Then I fitted a Sonoff Basic in the light fitting on the ceiling and set up a “scene” so that the T1 turns the Basic on via WiFi.

  5. Hi, do you know if the Tasmota Firmware supports publishing an MQTT message when a button is pressed?

  7. Hi, could you please show details on how to reprogram the touch switch including the connections necessary? Thanks.

  8. I have the following setup only having neutral (black) and live (red) for example going to a wall switch on lighting 1 gang ceiling light.

    As the T1 UK requires neutral, live in AND live out and you cannot loop the wires together. ITEAD should state on there T1 UK boxes not for installation without the necessary neutral connection.

    1. That is correct as I asked them to do that. Many other countries take a live, a neutral and the switching wire down the wall – and their boards then work fine – SOME installations in the UK only take the two wires (effectively live and the bulb) – presumably to save copper in WW2 !!! You must have a Neutral wire as well so you can provide live and neutral to the board…

  9. Anyone feels that this T1 with the 3-gang option be viable as a way to power 3 sockets, mostly supplying media products (TV, soundbar, Android box)?

    1. The T1 is rated @ 2A per channel so 6A overall.. however there is nothing stopping you controlling a 240v 10A relay from the T1 channel and use the relay to switch higher loads if needed.

  10. After a ton of learning I got Tasmota to work successfully on the Sonoff T1 and Node Red. Very Impressive… basic but will do the job. Ill buy another few T1s and try the OTA conversion, just think the FTDI USB converter method is way easyer. <;o)

    Node Red is running on a NanoPi Neo2 board with a NAS Kit with Ubuntu. It died a few hours ago, turned power off and on, but wont return to Static IP address. Checked /etc/dhcpcd.conf and all OK. Any Ideas?

    1. How did you succeeded? I’m at my second night trying to get it working. I have T1 3ch UK. And I’m not able to get it succeed 🙁

  11. Ok, Ok, not a SW guy… mostly HW….
    Tasmota won’t work on MY T1… tried 3 different approaches.

    Loaded Scargill’s Home SW rev. 1.8.5 and it works like a Sonoff Basic. Touch Switch won’t toggle and won’t light up. The touch switch outputs to Relay and to GPIO-12.

    I need a diagram to see where everything is connected… any help?

  12. Pete, just got mi Sonoff T1 US version and started to do research on how to reprogram it. I deleted all your old ROM files that would fit in 1MB flash. Manually GPIO0 is pin 10 on the PSF-A85. Can you have a version to fit these, without OTA? To tell you the truth I got some NodeMCU working with a very old version, for some reason it won’t OTA but not something that will need upgrading soon.

    I am not a Arduino fan and I love your SW. If this T1 works will be changing +20 switches all over the house. Been looking to use the Sonoff Basic with a Capacitive Touch switch but but the last one wont program after I swapped the memory. I guess I killed it with too much heat… hahaha!

    I guess I will try Tasmota on the T1 and see how it performs with Node-Red. Too bad ITEAD does not use 4MB flash from factory.

  13. I only have neutral (blue) and live (brown) going to my existing wall switch.

    I’ve also got an earth (green/yellow) but presume I just need to cap this off and not connect to the socket

    As the T1 requires neutral, live in AND live out – is there any way of me installing this?

    Thanks in advance for any help

    1. I would assume that you have a standard British setup – with a switched connection to the lamp – i.e. no NEUTRAL connection – that being the case I would suggest the unit will not work as it needs live and neutral to function.

  14. Unfortunately, my wife doesn’t like the tiny blue images and the Sonoff name on these switches (strangely, she has no problem with the blue led). Do you think these images can be removed with acetone or similar products?

  15. I just checked the method indicated by Gerardo Vaquerizo. I tried it using a new Sonoff Basic. It works fine, just keep in mind that where it says to install SonOTA that you use “pip3 -r requirements.txt” you should actually put “pip3 install -r requirements.txt”. Maybe it’s a bit complicated with so many access points …

    1. Not even looked at this due to having company – if this is done without wires, do I assume they’re breaking into the OTA system to replace the code? Good idea if so – I’ll do my T1 if it’s a winner…

      1. I have just used the ‘hands free’ method with a SONOFF Dual and it’s a piece of cake!

        I also edited the page “https://github.com/arendst/Sonoff-Tasmota/wiki/SonOTA—Espressif2Arduino—Tasmota-without-compiling” to clarify some things I got stuck with.

        To make the process more confortable I used the guest’s Network in my router to create the temporary Wifi: indebuurt1/VnsqrtnrsddbrN instead of using tethering on a smartphone.

        I was thinking in doing the process more automatic using a Raspberry-Pi (I installed Network Manager) but the AP name for the SONOFF is different on every device so I need more ‘inteligence’ to be able to connect to a Wifi named ITEAD-10000xxxxx (mine was ITEAD-10000887e9)

        I also discovered that the MAC in the unmodified SONOFF was D0:27:00:11:0D:22, and then, after the process, changed to 5C:CF:7F:9F:36:B1

        Anyway, the task seems to be robust, because I powered down the SONOFF a couple times. I was thinking the device was bricked as, because of the MAC change, it was assigned a different IP.

      2. just tested on a sonoff basic, flawless victory! Wrote here how i did, adding a missing bit to the procedure (had to update pip before have it working):
        https://github.com/mirko/SonOTA/issues/22

        it would end up with tasmota 5.5.2b and then i just put this in the ota online update field of my brand new tasmoted sonoff and it’s done…
        http://sonoff.maddox.co.uk/tasmota/sonoff.bin

        here the supported models: https://github.com/mirko/SonOTA/wiki

        now i’m on version 5.8.0, very well done, i’m happy 🙂

  17. I have some Sonoff Touch (the first model with one relay) in my house.
    My kids and my wife has small fingers and sometimes the touch sensor doesn’t work.
    I taught them to put the hole hand on the surface. On T1 this is not possible. Instead a T1 I recomand one Touch and 2 Sonoff standard (4.85$). To control 3 devices you can use Tasmota’s one touch, double touch and long touch functions

  18. Anyone know if these can be used as dimmer controllers, using tasmota and mqtt?

    Ie: a quick tap of the button will toggle on/off wheras a long-hold press will ramp up to max, then back down .

    1. Tasmota send only one HOLD message. It doesn’t depend how log you press the button over minimum hold time. You can modify the software to send multiple HOLD messages according to total hold time.

      Second solution:
      first short press tun on and set dime lever to 33%
      second short press set dime lever to 67%
      third short press set dime lever to 100%
      forth turn off

    1. Ah the old X10 current sense, it would often cause some devices (switching power supplies) to turn on and off randomly. I’ve clipped many a diode (?, I think it was a diode) to turn that off. That circuitry also shortened the life of the bulb.. The Insteon stuff was a lot better in that respect. Although the life of insteon products was much shorter. Sorry about the tangent.

      Anyway, I do recall that Sonoff had an American version (not square) but I couldn’t find it in the recent search. Been meaning to pick up one for experimenting.

    1. You probably don’t want to know… they steal power from the load… in other words when your load is off – it isn’t really off…. current flows from the live through the load to power the dimmer.. ok, very LITTLE current…..

    2. X10 needs only few mW for working. As Pete said they still energy from the light bulb. ESP8266 needs 150-200 mW which is huge, and cannot be stolen from a 5W led light without affect its performance.

  21. Just want to add that there is no 2way switch option. Therefore you won’t be able to use it, when you have a light that can be switched on by two or more switches.

    1. No, but if you’re using it with something like Node-Red, that’s easy enough to achieve by having the switch send the command to Node-RED as “toggle” and have Node-Red send the MQTT to actually set the relay.

  22. Any chance they will make it in the “standard” Australian size? (75mm wide by 115mm high). That square UK look doesn’t fit for us!

      1. They are saying on their Website that the American version is also an Australian stand one too. This information is incorrect. I think after they saw my video of their switch not working here due to screw problems, and another problem with the neutral line dropping from 240 volts to only 90 volts. They throught it fitted in our wall plate very wrong with the screw issue causing most of the pain Hopefully they will fix it soon as it was a tight fit with insulation tape wrapped around it to stop contact to the metal plate. I really don’t want to try it again like that.

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