Buy dead devices. Seriously.

The whole premise of this site is that a "bricked" smart device is usually a perfectly good computer whose owner gave up on it. That makes the second-hand market a candy store: gear whose cloud died sells for a fraction of retail, and the fix is a guide you can read for free. This page collects search links for the dead devices worth grabbing, plus the boards and tools our guides reach for.

Affiliate disclosure: some links on this page are affiliate links (the Amazon ones today), meaning Pigs Can Fly Labs LLC earns a small commission if you buy through them — at no extra cost to you. It helps keep the guides free. We only list the kind of gear the guides actually use, prices are whatever the store says they are, and a plain web search will find you the same things.

Dead devices, going cheap

When a vendor kills the cloud, the hardware price falls off a cliff — "doesn't work with the app" means broken to most sellers and a bargain for you. Check the listing photos for the exact model a guide covers, and assume anything sold "untested" needs a factory reset.

• Belkin WeMo smart plugs — Belkin shut the WeMo cloud down in January 2026, so these Wi-Fi plugs sell for pocket change. The hardware is fine — our guide locks an Insight Switch to LAN-only and hands it to Home Assistant. eBay · Amazon · Liberation guide
• Untested smart-plug and sensor lots — Job lots of "untested" smart plugs, bulbs and sensors go cheapest of all. Cross-check what turns up against the device catalogue before you bid. eBay · Liberation guide

Boards that bring them back

A lot of liberations end with a tiny ESP board doing the job the cloud used to pretend to do. (Confusingly, "WeMos" — now LOLIN — is a board maker, no relation to Belkin's WeMo plugs. You will meet both names in this hobby.) Not every device speaks Wi-Fi, so a radio dongle earns a place here too.

• WeMos / LOLIN D1 mini (ESP8266) — The default transplant board: Wi-Fi, a few bucks, huge community, drop-in support in ESPHome and Tasmota. Amazon · AliExpress
• ESP32 dev boards — For devices that need Bluetooth as well as Wi-Fi, or more pins than an ESP8266 offers. Amazon · AliExpress
• nRF52840 USB dongle — The radio-side counterpart to an ESP board. It speaks Bluetooth LE and 802.15.4, so one dongle covers both jobs a cloud-dead device tends to need: run Nordic's sniffer firmware to watch what a vendor's app is actually saying over BLE, or flash a Zigbee or Thread stack and let Home Assistant adopt orphaned Zigbee kit without a hub. It flashes over its own USB bootloader — no programmer, no soldering. Genuine Nordic PCA10059 units and clones both turn up; either is a few dollars. Amazon · AliExpress
• D1 mini relay shields — Stack one on a D1 mini and you have rebuilt the guts of a smart plug you actually own. Amazon

Tools worth having

Most software liberations need nothing but patience. The moment a guide says "solder" or "serial console", these earn their keep.

• USB-to-serial adapter (CP2102 / CH340) — The bridge between your laptop and a board's UART pins — flashing and debug consoles both come through here. Amazon
• Pinecil soldering iron — Small, USB-C powered, and cheap enough that "I don't own an iron" stops being the blocker. Amazon
• Jumper wires + breadboard kit — For the try-it-before-you-solder-it stage of every hardware mod. Amazon

The usual caveats

Second-hand electronics are as-is by nature: expect missing screws, mystery firmware versions, and the occasional genuinely dead unit in an "untested" lot. Check listings against the exact model a device guide covers before paying a premium for one. Mains-powered devices deserve respect — every guide that opens an enclosure starts with a de-energize step, and the disclaimer applies here too: this is for hardware you own, at your own risk.

Got a favourite source for cloud-orphaned hardware, or a board we should list? Tell us about it.