SONOFF E32-MSX-NX NSPanel Touch Display Switch with Tasmota Firmware Installation Guide

: June 5, 2024
: SonOFF

Table of Contents

SONOFF E32-MSX-NX NSPanel Touch Display Switch with Tasmota Firmware
Overview
Documentation approach
Install and configure OpenWeatherMap
Installation and configuration
Install and configure Mosquitto MQTT Broker
Links and references
References
Read User Manual Online (PDF format)
Download This Manual (PDF format)

SONOFF E32-MSX-NX NSPanel Touch Display Switch with Tasmota Firmware

Overview

This documentation describes the installation steps for how to flash a Sonoff NSPanel with Tasmota firmware and then to connect it to a OpenHAB3 system. The setup also assumes you would like to get weather information on the start panel.

Components used for the setup:

A Windows PC to do the work on
Raspberry Pi (minimum 3, recommended 4)
A USB Serial Adapter
Some cables to connect the USB serial adapter to the circuit board of the NSPanel.
Sonoff NSPanel EU
OpenHABian (v1.7.2), components needed:
- Binding: MQTT Binding
- Binding: OpenWeatherMap Binding
- Add-on: JSONpath Transformation
- Add-on: RegEx Transformation
- Automation: Groovy Scripting
Mosquitto MQTT broker (included in OpenHABian)
OpenWeatherMap cloud service

Disclaimer
Use this documentation at your own risk! The author assumes no responsibility of any mishaps resulting in your use of this documentation.

Acknowledgments
m-home (Mike) – For his initiative and appreciated efforts to bring NSPanel to OpenHAB
Blakadder – For creating a Tasmota firmware for NSPanel
Lewis Barclay – Especially this video which is the source for my flashing documentation (I actually suggest you use this for the flashing part and use my documentation only as a reference).

Hardware and Protocols
The picture below shows a typical openhabian setup with a control unit connected to underlying hardware (switches, sensors, interfaces) and external services (OpenWeatherMap). The documentation will focus on the NSPanel setup and assume you have a running openhabian system (OpenHAB 3) and your other hardware is already configured and available in openhabian.

I also assume you are accustomed to OpenHAB and its concepts such as items, things, channels, etc.

Documentation approach

The key aim in this documentation is to answer the question “what should I do” with a spice of “how does it work” whenever there is some understanding needed hampering the first question.
I’m also assuming that you want to display weather information on the panel.

This guide is covering the following steps:

Install and configure OpenWeatherMap
Install and configure Mosquitto MQTT broker
Flashing Sonoff NSPanel with Tasmota
Post configuration of Tasmota on NSPanel
Base setup of NSPanel-to-OpenHAB communication (make NSPanel talk to openhab and customize the first screen)
Custom panel configuration – The fun part where you design the layout and connect the control of your devices to NSPanel.

Each step is described in a separate chapter. Each chapter starts with links to sources and other relevant information.

Install and configure OpenWeatherMap

If you do not want weather information on the start panel or use another service, just skip this step.
OpenWeatherMap is a cloud service providing weather forecasts based on your location. There is an OpenWeatherMap binding that calls the OpenWeatherMap API making the setup and use in OpenHAB very straight forward.

Links and references

Link to OpenWeatherMap service: https://openweathermap.org

Installation and configuration

Very intuitive steps but describing this anyhow for completeness.

Get API key from OpenWeatherMap
- Browse to https://openweathermap.org and create an account
- Select: API keys
- Select: Generate
- API Key: y2)uc2a7cae3d54037563f30r2e0637cp (example; you will get another key)
- This key will be entered in the OpenWeatherMap account item next step.
Configure Your OpenHAB
- Install: OpenWeatherMap binding
- Select: Settings
- Select: Things and press ”+”
- Select: OpenWeatherMap Binding
- Select: OpenWeatherMap Account (this is just to store your API key)
- Enter your API key: y2)uc2a7cae3d54037563f30r2e0637cp
- Select: Save (top right)
- It takes a while – hour(s) – for your API key being registered and provisioned to be usable, so the status of this thing will be red until this has happened – so no alarm.
- Next step is to create the Local Weather and Forecas (One Call API) thing which will be the one you actually will be using
- Select: Things and press ”+”
- Select: OpenWeatherMap Binding
- Select: Local Weather and Forecast (One Call API)
As Bridge; Select: OpenWeatherMap Account
As Location of Weather; Enter:
As Number of Days; Enter: 2 (2=today and tomorrow. You can of course change this but as the NSPanel has only one small piece of the primary display for weather forecasts. I was primarily interested in tomorrow’s weather. So this reduces the number of channels in the created item to what
- Select: Save (top right)
- Also this thing will also have a status of red until your API key is provisioned, so don’t worry…
This concludes the preparations.

Install and configure Mosquitto MQTT Broker

MQTT overview
MQTT is a standard messaging protocol for the Internet of Things (IoT). It is designed as an extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport that is ideal for connecting remote devices with a small code footprint and minimal network bandwidth.

Links and references

General MQTT overview https://www.instructables.com/MQTT-on-Openhab-3-Tutorial/

Installation and configuration
This chapter will only cover the basic MQTT setup. The actual integration of OpenHAB with NSPanel is described in chapter Fel! Hittar inte referenskälla..

The picture below shows a generic MQTT setup for OpenHAB. The NSPanel device will communicate with the Mosquitto broker which in turn communicates with the thing MQTT broker thing (bride) which in turn is tied to your actual NSPanel MQTT thing. (IP’ are of course mine, you will have others..). Once configured, the MQTT broker thing and Mosquito broker do not need to be touched anymore and will support most of your MQTT use cases .

Install Mosquitto – This is a “MQTT broker” coming with the openhabian image, steps are:
a. Log on your openhab with putty (or any other ssh client)
b. Run command: sudo openhabian-config
c. Select: 20 Optional Components
d. Select: 23 Mosquitto
e. Username will be openhabian (Note! remember this, username and password needs to be entered in both the NSPanel device and the MQTT broker thing bridge)
f. Enter the password: mqttpwd22??
g. The Mosquitto broker will now start and listen for traffic on port 1883
Base configuration of the MQTT broker thing (bridge)
a. Log on as admin in the OpenHAB web interface. First we need to install some required components:
i. Select: Settings in the menu
ii. Select: addons and install ”JSONpath Transformation” (This is needed to do JSON transformations in a Channel definition)
iii. Select: addons and install ”RegEx Transformation” (This is needed to do regex-selections on a JSON response in a Channel definition)
iv. Select: bindings and install ”MQTT Binding”b. Select: Things and press ”+”
c. Select: MQTT Broker (this is just a bridge between your MQTT things and the Mosquitto broker)
d. Select: Add manually
e. Select: MQTT Brooker
f. Enter:
i. Broker Hostname/IP: localhost
ii. Quality of Service: Exactly Once
iii. Username: openhabian
iv. Password: mqttpwd22??
Finally configure extended logging for the mosquitto broker. You will need this to see the JSON’s sent from the NSPanel. This is done by creating a configuration file for the Mosquitto broker, steps are:
a. Log on your openhab with putty (or any other ssh client)
b. Run the command: sudo echo “log_type all”

/etc/mosquitto/conf.d/local.conf
c. Run the command: sudo service mosquitto reload
d. The mosquitto service now reloads the configuration files and starts extended logging. This really helps in later steps when you need to see what is happening between openhab and NSPanel. Once all configuration is done and everything works, delete the file again and reissue the “reload” command above.

Flashing Sonoff NSPanel with Tasmota
This step is effectively replacing the stock firmware that came with NSPanel and thus voiding your warranty, so you do this on your own risk.

Links and references

Tasmoto windows binary for flashing ESP firmware: Releases · Jason2866/ESP_Flasher · GitHub
Tasmota firmware for NSPanel:
https://github.com/tasmota/install/raw/main/firmware/unofficial/tasmota32-nspanel.bin
Tasmoto NSPanel Documentation: Sonoff NSPanel Touch Display Switch (E32-MSW-NX) Configuration for Tasmota (blakadder.com)
Server/location hosting latest nxpanel.tft definition: Index of /nxpanel (proto.systems)
Location of “nxpanel.be”, the panel definition file adapted for OpenHAB: ns-flash/berry at master · peepshow-21/ns-flash · GitHub

Preparations
Preparations consist of downloading and installing flashing tools and flash images

Download Python
Download latest version of Python from here: Download Python | Python.org

Tick the checkbox for “Add Python to PATH” before install

Install esptool
The esptool.py is a python script that can check if you have connection with the controller in NSPanel through the serial USB adapter. You can also use the script to make a backup of the existing firmware.

To install esptool do the following:

On your PC, Start a cmd window (console window)
Enter: pip install esptool

Detailed instructions available here: How to Install Esptool on Windows 10 – CyberBlogSpot
Download Flashing Script (ESP-Flasher)
ESP-Flasher is a flashing tool that writes a flash image to a device using a USB serial adapter.

Download ESPflasher from here: GitHub – Jason2866/ESP_Flasher: Tasmota Flasher for ESP8266 and ESP32
The actual binary for windows is called “ESP-Flasher-Windows-x64.exe” and available here: Releases · Jason2866/ESP_Flasher · GitHub

Downloading new firmware for NSPanel
Firmware from Blackadder for NSPanel (firmware file is called “tasmota32-nspanel.bin”)

Go to this link: https://github.com/blakadder/nspanel
Download tasmota32-nspanel.bin by downloading the entire Code file as zip and then copy this file from the zip into a folder on your PC.

Ready to flash?
You should now have the following files to flash new firmware and do initial Tasmota config:

ESP-Flasher-Windows-x64.exe
Tasmota32-nspanel.bin

Flash Sonoff NSPanel firmware
This step describes preparations and flashing of NSPanel firmware to Tasmota.

Connect your USB serial adapter to NSPanel (NOTE! Make sure you to connect 3.3V and NOT 5V. The serial adapter below has two pins, one for 3.3V and one for 5V. Other serial adapters might have a jumper to set 3.3V)
On your PC: Open a command window (cmd)
Check connection with serial port on chip
a. Type: esptool.py flash_id
b. You should get a response as shown in the screen shot below.
Make a backup of current firmware:
a. Type: esptool.py read_flash 0x0 0x400000 nspanel.bin
When done, it looks something like this:
Flash now firmware with ESP-Flasher
a. Type: ESP-Flasher-Windows-x64.exe
b. Select: COM-port in the dropdown (should be only one = USB Serial adapter
c. Select: Browse
d. Go to the location of the firmware
e. Select: the new firmware (tasmota32-nspanel.bin)
f. Select: Flash ESP
When done, it will look something like: