Firmware Liberator

Sonoff eWeLink → Tasmota, OpenBeken, ESPHome

Your Firmware Flasher Tool
(Fully OTA - ‘Over The Air’ - I.e Flash over Wi-Fi)

Keep this tool alive and growing

Your donation goes toward expansion, supporting many more devices - Thankyou!

Bonus: Sponsor through GitHub and you earn the coveted Sponsor achievement on your profile:

Liberation From The Cloud

Your device answers to you alone, on your own network.

Removes dependence on external cloud servers. After flashing you’ll no longer require a cloud account or third party app, and even after a cloud service is switched off your device keeps working and remains fully under your control.

Any Direction

And every route between them.

Stock Sonoff to Tasmota, OpenBeken or ESPHome, either to the other, and back to Sonoff’s own firmware if you change your mind.

Sonoff (eWeLink), Tasmota or OpenBeken, and ESPHome: any one converts to any other

Fully automated ‘Over The Air’ firmware conversion

Turn your stock Sonoff S60 smart plug into one running Tasmota or ESPHome using OTA method - no soldering, no taking the plug apart. Move the plug between the two, or back to Sonoff’s own firmware. The S61S, with OpenBeken too, is coming soon.

Conversion with this tool is fully automated end to end, with checks at every stage. It is resumable and can be restarted at any point.

No More Soldering

Until now, the established way to put Tasmota on an S60 was to open it, perform some soldering and flash it over USB-serial - hard work, because the case is plastic-welded shut.

The community threads for the soldering method:

UK version: arendst/Tasmota#22554

EU version: arendst/Tasmota#21255

Indistinguishable

Converted plugs end up identical to a plug flashed over USB

The final automated checks verify this by reading their flash back at the end of the conversion. Every block of it is read back before the plug switches to it.

What you need

The plug

A Wi-Fi Sonoff S60, e.g:
UK: S60TPG | European: S60TPF
(Not the Zigbee S60)
The S61S (iPlug Gen2, model S61STPF) is being worked on: see devices/sonoff-s61/.

An eWeLink account

Free. A throwaway one is fine. The plug has to be added to it first.

A computer

Linux, macOS or Windows, with Wi-Fi.

Administrator rights

The tool needs them to add one temporary firewall rule (allowing the plug to communicate with your computer, removed when the tool finishes).

What it supports

Support for more devices coming soon.

Model

✅ Sonoff S60TPG - UK / Type G
✅ Sonoff S60TPF - EU / Type E/F

Stock firmware

✅ 1.1.1
✅ 1.2.0

Computer

✅ Linux
✅ Windows
✅ macOS

Let’s go

Simply paste this one line into your terminal…

You’re walked through every step of the conversion. The line downloads the latest release into your home folder and starts it.

Windows

powershell -c "irm https://github.com/adamsthws/firmware-liberator/releases/latest/download/liberate.ps1 | iex"

macOS

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://github.com/adamsthws/firmware-liberator/releases/latest/download/liberate.sh)"

Linux

sh -c "$(wget -qO- https://github.com/adamsthws/firmware-liberator/releases/latest/download/liberate.sh)"

If that says wget: not found, use the macOS line instead.

Or with git, or a zip

git clone https://github.com/adamsthws/firmware-liberator.git
cd firmware-liberator
sh start.sh       # Linux / macOS
.\start.cmd       # Windows

– or – download as a zip, and double-click start.cmd

What you’ll see

Tasmota:

A successful conversion to Tasmota

ESPHome:

A successful conversion to ESPHome

If you have to stop

E.g. you close the window, lose your Wi-Fi, run out of time - it doesn’t matter. Run the same command again - the one line above, or start.cmd / sh start.sh in the folder.

It remembers which plug it was working on and what it had done. Where a step was interrupted, it checks the plug to work out where to resume from.

What you end up with

Tasmota: Official Tasmota

ESPHome: Official ESPHome

Sonoff: A full backup of the plug’s Sonoff firmware to restore later.

Afterward, you update Tasmota and ESPHome as normal. Or run the tool again to update your plug’s Tasmota, or this project’s ESPHome, to the release the tool installs, keeping its settings.

If something goes wrong

Start with docs/troubleshooting.md - it covers the problems that actually came up while the tool was being built.

Reporting how it went

Whether it worked first time or stopped partway, please report back on how it went here:

Conversions In The Wild (Conversion Reports)

A clean conversion, a run that stopped partway, or only the read-only checks - all of it is useful.

Reading the thread is the quickest way to see how it went for others.

More detail

docs/technical-details.md - the firmware bundle, secrets handling, memory layout, notes for devs.
docs/what-happens.md - how it works and what happens to the plug, step by step.
docs/troubleshooting.md - problems met so far and their fixes.
docs/emulator.md - the whole conversion run against an emulated s60 plug.
docs/unattended.md - running a conversion with nobody at the keyboard - for testing.
docs/testing.md - how the tool is tested: unit tests, the emulator, every fault in the way of every step, and real plugs.
docs/updating-firmware.md - how the Tasmota and ESPHome the tool installs are updated to each new release.
docs/private-backup.md - for the maintainer: how their own Sonoff backup is kept sealed and private, off their computer.
docs/device-names.md - the name the plug goes by at each stage, where each is set, and how to change them.
docs/upstream-contributions.md - bugs found and fixed while building this project.
archive/docs/reference/ - the original research, the manual procedure and how the firmware format was decoded.
docs/legal.md - how the project keeps backing up Sonoff’s firmware lawful, and what it asks of you.

Roadmap

This project has big ambitions. The difficult groundwork has been laid down to support devices built on both Espressif and Beken chips.

Next is expanding the list of supported devices - more Espressif-based and more Beken-based ones alike.

Also being considered: support for Supla firmware, Zamel modules and Tuya devices.

Thanks

Thanks too to everyone in the Tasmota threads for the UK and EU S60, whose open-the-case method came first.

A big thank you to HG0161 and the SonoffS60OTA repository for working out the update mechanism, decoding the firmware format and proving the OTA update route. (Worked out with the Tasmota community’s discussion of this device).

Thanks to lcgamboa for the QEMU fork that emulates the ESP32, and to openshwprojects for the Beken emulator. Every conversion is tested against them before it reaches a real plug.

Thanks to p1otr for the ESPHome option and its S60 config.

See LICENSE and NOTICES.md.

To Sonoff and eWeLink

Thankyou for making such excellent devices. Please keep this update method open. Letting owners run their own firmware is a win for you as well as for them.

It sells plugs.

Tasmota began life as Sonoff-Tasmota: a great many people first bought Sonoff because they could reflash it, and the home-automation community still recommends the brand for that reason. Every plug this tool supports is one more reason to choose Sonoff over a sealed alternative - and the sale is yours either way.

It costs you less.

A converted plug never calls your servers again. You keep the sale and drop the years of cloud traffic, accounts and app support that would have come with it. Sell more, support less.

The owners support themselves.

Someone who installs their own firmware takes on its upkeep. Tasmota, ESPHome and OpenBeken are maintained by their own communities, at no cost to you.

Nothing is lost.

The tool needs the owner’s own plug, added to their own eWeLink account. It touches no one else’s device, and it keeps the plug’s Sonoff firmware so it can be put back at any time.

It earns goodwill.

Your own DIY mode once let owners flash their own firmware over Wi-Fi: you have seen the value in this before. A device that outlives its app, or its cloud service, stays out of a landfill and keeps its owner’s trust in the brand that made it.