[ECR6600 ] Teardown and OpenBeken Conversion of TNCE TUYA Smart Plug WiFi from AliExpress

Hi all! Let me share my teardown of TNCE TUYA Smart Plug WiFi I recently bought on AliExpress for 5 euros. The original Tuya firmware was pretty unstable and I decided to covert it to OpenBeken. Luckily, OpenBeken supports ECR6600 platform so it was possible to flash it via UART. I'll show the flashing process here step by step.

Here is the look of the device





To open up the device without much damage I used a vice: slightly squeezing from both sides till the little crack sound allows to crack the glue and split the plastic into 2 parts



Then removing one little screw allows to extract the PCB










We can see that the socket is built on the basis of ECR6600, which OpenBeken recently supported. To measure the voltage/current they use BL0937CF.

On the back of the PCB, there are convenient pads to solder the USB-UART adapter



Then we need an external 3.3V power source, I used an adjustable lab one



I used this guide https://www.elektroda.com/rtvforum/topic4111822.html to flash the firmware, in a nutshell you need to:
1) Download ESWIN_ECR6600_RDTool_v1.0.21.zip from here https://github.com/openshwprojects/FlashTools/tree/main/TransaSemi-ESWIN and use RDTool.exe
2) In RDTool you double click "develop tool" tab, select the COM port, and on "all-in-one file path" select the firmware from latest release https://github.com/openshwprojects/OpenBK7231T_App/releases/ (ECR6600 UART Flash) - I used OpenECR6600_1.18.62.bin
3) Then you need to click start and enable the power source of a device. You might not get in sync from the first attempt (there is some very specific timing, smth like 0.5 sec to power device after start clicked) - that's okay, you will succeed eventually.
4) After the program finishes the flashing - you all set, the device runs free firmware now.

Now you can unsolder the wires, put PCB back in a case and try to put it in the socket. WiFi hotspot should be running now.

The pins configuration is:



UPD: Attached the original firmware

Enjoy!
AI: Did you encounter any specific issues or challenges during the teardown or firmware conversion process?
No, just needed to collect the info from different sources
AI: How familiar are you with similar teardown and firmware flashing processes?
A bit