Wifi Smart IR Contoller – S4829 – A look at hardware and Tasmota Flashing

This article is for those with a technical bent looking for information on this product – as I did not find anything meaningful  I leave my observations below.

I purchased one of these units off Aliexpress for a pittance – and I did not get a bargain.   While it is possible that this unit worked out-the-box, the design is “not great”.

I attempted to use tuya-convert to flash this unit with Tasmota.  That failed and left me with something of a brick.  (ie it corrupted the existing firmware)  I then opened the unit to attach leads and flash Tasmota on it that way.    The connection points are tiny and scattered all over the board – and in very close proximity to components and extremely difficult to solder.   it is unclear to me whether the board was faulty or I managed to damage something with my soldering iron – I expect the latter.   About the only positive observation  I can make about this product is that the are that the connection points are labelled.

FWIW, the ESP8266 variant is the ESP8266EX.

I also learnt that you can get output from a serial console at 74880 baud, but connection errors and the inability to flash anything if the soldering is not done right – I assume I had soldered the TX but not RX.   To get this board to flash work you also need to solder GPIO0 to round.

I was unimpressed with the quality of the board.  As pictures are worth more then words I attach photographs below.  I can confirm that the color variances you see are not JPG artifacts, and that these images were taken before I had taken a soldering iron to the board. If you still want to open one up and try get Tasmota to work, you need to pry the case off through the center – it clips together.  There are no external screws.   (There are 3 tiny screws holding the board to the inside of the case).

I note that despite whats written on the board, I received the unit on May 2021.

Despite much effort, I was able to get IRReceive working (with device type 62), but was not able to control the LED or, more importantly, get any response when using IRSend).   I’ve purchased an alternative unit I hope I’ll be able to get working.