in today's video we're going to be having a look at the latest smart switch by sonoff the ns panel
we're going to be having a look at what the product is some of its features and
functionality and if you do stick around till the end i'll be showing you how to
add it into your amazon echo and of course home assistant check it out
what's going on guys i hope you're all doing well if you follow me on any of my social media
accounts then you will have seen this device pop up a few times in the last couple of months
but before we get into what it is and what it does there's a couple of things that i want to just
point out here first of all full transparency as always i was given this product for free by sonoff
for the purposes of testing but i was never paid or even asked to create the video and everything
you see in this video are all my own personal thoughts and opinions the second thing is is
that this is an early production unit so things may change in the kickstarter or by the time
the actual product launches so just bear that in mind and the final thing is is that at the
time of recording this the kickstarter hasn't yet launched so i'm not actually sure what the price
of an individual unit is but if you head down to the description below you'll find a link to the
kickstarter which will have now started i'll be revisiting the ns panel in a future video but for
now let me know what you think of it and what you actually think of the cost in the comments
below so what is this thing to put it simply the ns panel is a smart scene wall switch it
replaces your traditional wall switch and aims to be an all-in-one multi-functional control center
it achieves this by making use of a full color 3.5 inch touchscreen which gives you various bits
of information as well as offers touch control for various different smart home devices scenes
and groups you also have two physical buttons on the bottom of the panel which allows you
to control the two relays with the panel you've got four different methods for interacting with
it you can make use of the touch screen the two physical buttons voice control using either the
amazon echo or google assistant it also supports alice if you're one of those guys and you can
also remotely control it by making use of the e we link r if you're wondering what the ns stands for
it stands for next gen and sonoff so this thing makes use of a 3.5 inch hmi next in touch display
and in addition to that it also contains an esp32 both of those components the screen and the esp32
are great for smart home enthusiasts as well as people that just like to tinker with electronics
having these components opens future doors for things like custom firmware and modability
and we'll be coming back to that a little later on there's two different models of the panel
there's the eu version and the us version both panels are identical in terms of spec
they just have a different footprint the eu version is a square design and the us version
is a rectangle i received the square eu version it comes in a blue branded sewn off box on the
outside of the box you'll find all the relevant bits of information about everything that the
product can do and on the inside you'll obviously find the panel itself as well as an instruction
manual and some mounting screws to get the panel up and running and connected you're going to
need to have access to live and neutral wires now unfortunately here in the uk and in this current
house that i'm in i don't have access to those and as i'm currently in the process of moving
i didn't plan on installing any extra neutral wires just to get this thing connected so i
could have just hooked up the panel to some power on my desk but i thought i'd do something a bit
different and i created a little development board the board's fully reusable and it's really simple
to swap out the switch so i can test other smart home switches and i also left plenty of space in
order to add extra electronics to it in the future i tasked the question of naming the board to my
patreons and two of the options we had were the automation station and karen after plankton's wife
let me know in the comments below which of these two names you think fit the board
back to it then the panel is connected using wi-fi and utilizes a 2.4 gigahertz network connection
as well as the 802.11 standard the panel's got two 2 amp relays which are drivable by making
use of the four methods that we previously spoke about as it's only 2 amps you're only going to
be using it with lights and you're not going to be hooking up big electric loads and machines
so if that's what you were hoping for then you might be a bit disappointed the dimensions for
the panel are 86 by 86 millimeters for the eu version and 120 by 74 for the us version
if you're wondering how far it actually sticks out in the back box it's about 30 millimeters
so as long as you've got a back box with a depth of at least 30 millimeters
you should be good to go the main panel body which houses the touchscreen and the physical buttons
attaches directly to the back plate and the relays it does this through a small connector on the back
of the panel so once you've wired everything up in the back plate you simply just push on the front
plate once you've got it all wired up and powered on you're going to need to set up the panel using
the ewelink app this is a straightforward process where you just open the app up and add a device
it will then just connect to the panel using bluetooth and it'll pass over things like the
wi-fi credentials once you've got it connected to your account you can give it a name in case
you've got multiple different panels you can also set its locale which will allow it to set its time
its weather and also its outside temperature all automatically the display on the panel is
okay but it's nothing really to shout about it's not the sharpest or the most clearest but i guess
it's been chosen for a reason and i think that reason is to just keep the cost of this unit down
one gripe that i've got with this screen is that it's got really poor viewing angles
so if you're not dead centered looking at it it's actually quite hard to see what's on the screen
now this isn't that big of an issue because if you are using it as a touch screen then you are going
to be stood in front of it but maybe if you wanted to just glance at it to check the time or to see
what the temperature is and if you're not dead centered then you're not going to be able to see
that the touch controls for the panel are what you'd expect and the navigation is very simple
pulling down from the top of the screen as you would with a smartphone reveals the brightness
slider and the timeout settings the panel's touch interface consists of three main parts you've got
the main screen which shows you the time and date as well as the temperature for the locale you're
in you've then got the widget screen which allows you to have a maximum of eight different widgets
on screen the widgets can be other smart home devices or scenes if it's a device it steps into
another interface that allows you to have more granular control over that specific device so
for this example i was able to add my sonoff leds as a widget and i was then able to control the
brightness and the color of the leds just a couple of things to point out here these other smart home
devices have to be sewn off products and they have to be registered with your ewe link app
the other thing to know is that the sonoff zigbee bridge isn't supported so any devices you've got
connected to that you won't have access to so in my example i've got one of the sonoff zigbee
plugs and i can't access that as it connects to the zigbee bridge i did however come up with a
bit of a workaround for this and i was able to add the plug as a scene to turn it on and off
these scenes were then accessible in the ns panel so i could turn the plug on and off
i wouldn't say that this workaround's super practical though as you only get access to eight
widgets and there's not a way to set a toggle in a scene so you have it either on or off so by doing
this with the plug that technically takes up two slots of my eight widgets and the last screen of
the interface is the thermostat with this you get access to a small touchscreen thermostat dial just
below the thermostat gauge you'll see a little minus and plus button you can tap on these to
increment and decrement the thermostat temperature another method for adjusting the temperature is to
just drag the dot on the gauge with the thermostat you've got two different modes you've got the
manual mode and the automatic mode the manual mode self-explanatory but with the automatic mode
you're going to need to set up a schedule that it will follow to set up the schedule you'll need to
be making use of the ewelink app and from here you can pick the time and date as well as how often
the schedule is going to repeat in comparison to some of the other smart home temperature
sensors that i've got i did find that the ns panel was reporting a couple of degrees higher
now i don't know if that's because i was doing a lot of testing and touching the screen a lot or
if just that the temperature sensor on the panel is just quite sensitive the panel's temperature
sensor is located at the bottom of the panel and it just sticks out through the bottom of the case
if you make use of the e-wheeling app you can also set up additional functionality to the physical
buttons you can add features like power on state in chin and interlock-in and on top of those
things you can also set up things like schedules timers and loot timers all to control your relays
okay so up to this point everything we've seen and looked at is all based around the sonoff ecosystem
and the ewilink app but what about if you want to be external from those services
let's start off with the amazon echo so this one's a nice straightforward one all you're going
to need to do is just download the ewelink skill and once that's set up and activated it will just
auto discover all of your sewn off devices and it will just find the ns panel once it's discovered
your panel you'll be able to start making use of your voice to control the relays you can control
the relays individually or you can control them both at the same time turn on ns panel outlet 2
i was hoping that with the panel and echo connected that the echo would be able to see
the panel switches and be able to create routines based on those switch actions but you're not able
to do that if you could do that or it does get added in the future that's going to be
a really simple way of connecting your ns panel to third-party products so for example on that
button press you could turn on a two-year light or a hue light okay up next is home assistant and
i've been able to successfully add the ns panel into home assistant by making use of a custom
component by alex it the custom component is sewn offline and it's available through the hack store
i'll have a link to it in the description below if you want to go and check it out using this
custom component i'm able to access channel 1 and channel 2 which are the two different
switches for the relays it works well and it's near enough instant as you can see in this video
pressing the switching home assistant updates the panel instantly but going the other way
around pressing the switch on the panel takes a couple of seconds for it to actually update
in home assistant in addition to the two relay controls you do also get access to
two of the switches but i have no idea what these are i did try toggling them on and off
but they didn't seem to do anything i thought maybe they were the thermostat controls but
they're not with this integration you can also view some extra information in the attributes
so you can see what software version it is you can see the humidity and you can also see the
temperature for me personally just being able to control those relays would be enough as you could
simply tie scripts and automations to the various states of the switches so with my example earlier
where i said controlling a two-year or a hue bulb you can just do that with home assistant and all
of this is possible on just the stock firmware so with no changes or modifications being made so
imagine when this thing's been out for a while and people have had to play around with it
and written some custom software this thing could be quite cool okay so what about the
mod ability and the hackability this thing is a prime candidate for some custom firmware or
to be flashed with something else and i guarantee it won't be long before this thing is in esp home
or tasmota once the product gets off kickstarter and gets out there in the wild i think we'll start
seeing a lot of big community changes for it which is always a good thing for smart home enthusiasts
with the panel i feel like sonoff have purposely designed it in a modular and easy to access way
the panel comes apart simply and all the gpio pins are all labeled and very easy to access
and as i previously said it really won't be long until somebody adds this thing into esp home
has motor or something else we're gonna wrap this up now by going through some of
the cons and the issues that i've had with the panel but again do bear in mind that this is
an early production unit so these things may be ironed out or something that i'm saying as a con
might not necessarily be a con to you my first con then is to do with the display and it's the fact
that you can't change that wallpaper or change any of the icons which you'd think you would be able
to considering this is going to be on display in whichever room you have it in hopefully this
is something that can just be added in a future update maybe you could choose from a range of
different themes or even add your own photos my next con is to do the mechanisms so with this
i'm talking about the touchscreen and the buttons for me personally i don't think the touchscreen is
as responsive as it should be so there's been lots of times i've tried swiping through the screens or
adjusting the sliders or clicking something on the screen and it's just not registering properly
with the buttons you have to press them directly in the center otherwise it doesn't register
properly as a click which is quite annoying really because sometimes when you press it on the edge
it feels like it is clicking but it doesn't actually register so enough did mention in
an email that they're making some changes to the buttons so i don't know if that means the batch
after this one is going to have improved buttons but i guess we'll find out and my final content
isn't really a con it's more of an improvement so my improvement would be to add a look sensor or a
motion sensor the purpose of the look sensor would be to have the light change dynamically based on
the lighting in the room so if it was dark in the room the screen would be a bit brighter and if it
was really bright then the screen would be a bit darker and the purposes of the motion sensor would
be to have the screen light up when you approached it i personally think both of those improvements
are pretty solid and who knows we might see those in a future version and there we go that's been a
little look at the ns panel if you've enjoyed this video don't forget to drop me a like and
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