If you want to retrofit your home with smart outlets and lightbulbs, bust out your wallet. You can easily spend forty dollars for a smart light bulb at your local home supply store, and strips of smart sockets could cost sixty. When [coogle] found a WiFi-enabled four-outlet power strip on Amazon, he couldn’t resist. Sure, the no-name strip would be locked down behind a stupid iPhone interface and will probably turn your house into a botnet, but never mind that: you can easily reprogram these power strips to be whatever you want.

After receiving these power strips and tearing them open, [coogle] found exactly what you would expect from a no-name white goods manufacturer. There’s a board with an Espressif chip and a WiFi antenna, and a second board with a few relays, with a few wires connecting the two. You only need to browse AliExpress for a few minutes to figure out what’s going on here. The brains of the outfit are in the ESP8266, and if you can control that, you have your own Internet of Power Strips.

The problem, then, was reprogramming the ESP8266. This was a version of the chip [coogle] hadn’t seen before, but a quick query with the Google Mother Brain revealed it was a WT8266-S1 module, with all the pins required for programming easily accessible on a convenient header. After connecting this header up to an ESP programming board, [coogle] had all the relevant information including the capacity of the Flash. There’s still a bit more work to make this a functional WiFi power outlet, namely figuring out which GPIOs and wires connect to which relays, but this is effectively a completely Open IoT device right now. All you have to do is bring your own firmware.