I wanted to replace all my home wall switches with smart switches but everything I saw either looked ghetto, was overly expensive or failed to fit in the small footprint of standard North American switch boxes. I had played with the ever popular Sonoff Basic modules from ITEAD (http://www.itead.cc/) but I struggled to find an elegant solution to placing them safely in a single wall socket along with a suitable (non fugly) switch... then, while fumbling to reinstall a standard switch after a failed upgrade, I noticed something.
I saw that the mechanical switch was essentially two parts fused together and I wondered if I could somehow split them apart and replace the back with a laminated Sonoff Basic...
Not only was the end result a success, but the total completed depth was exactly the same as the original unmodified simple (aka dumb?) mechanical switch.
Simple, elegant and complete with ambient backlit indication, I had found the holy grail of cheap, clean, safe and easy-to-install smart switches.
Follow along and see how you can build one for yourself.