Device going unavailable

I use an hp mini Intel i5 with 8gigs and SSD full dedicated to homeassistant.

Pretty familiar with that page.

I had two out of 12 esp nodes that kept rebooting. I never really measured the exact time intervals. On one of them I disabled ‘logger’ and on another one I removed a HX711 weight sensor that I didn’t need. After that both esp nodes worked reliably. My approach was to make the bin file size as small as possible. I never did enable bluetooth proxy on either one.

@fantangelo Interesting… so how “busy” the ESP device is could be a factor in it dropping off? I noticed this issue on a couple ESP 8266 Wemo D1 that I am working on. One has 4 sensors (3 are on a single chip) and the other has 7 (3 with at least 2 sensors on their chip). The 4 sensor one is deployed and I discussed it here:

The code itself is pretty basic and I too disabled the logger, or at least I think I did with this:

logger:
    baud_rate: 0 #disabled

If you open the wireless logger from the ESPHome page, they output tons of logs though but I am guessing that is only active when the window is open, right?

I think that in my case it was a matter of the compiled filesize being borderline too big. The OTA updates completed successfully but I had these frequent restarts. When I made the filesize smaller by removing some sensors then everything was smooth again.
I disabled the logger by commenting it right out. ie #logger:
It means that I cannot see the online logs of the node but at least it does not reboot.

I just checked and I did not get instances of “unavailable” all last night… the only thing that I changed was updating my 5 Unifi APs with the latest beta firmware… :thinking:

EDIT: Day later now… I saw some ‘unavailable’ but discovered these match system reboots… so since I updated the APs, I have not had any further instances of them going unavailable. The fixes in the AP firmware were indeed related to kernel crashes that were causing connectivity issues. Anyhow I am quite sure the instances will pop up again for some other reason given how many posts I’ve found about this issue…

Which beta did you apply? I’ve suddenly started to have this issue across all my ESP Home devices but I’m not sure when it started. I just know it’s started recently as my son’s light switch is reconnecting, turning on, and waking him up.

@jjross If you are referring to Unifi AP firmware, I am currently updating each time a new beta firmware is published in EA due to connectivity issues I was seeing. It appears that the latest beta 6.5.9 is working well as I no longer see my ESP32 go offline repeatedly.

Thanks. I’m using UniFi and wanted to try to fix my issues. Turns out it must have been MDNS because I locked in a static IP and all is well.

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Unchecking the WMM Mode mode for the IOT wifi access point (vlan bridge) on openwrt fixed the issue for me. I had unstable wifi ( uptime sensor value was stable).

Now everything seems stable and working as expected.

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Just another solution changing router settings.
I have 4 - D1 minis running in ESPHome in Home Assistant on an Asus ZenWifi XD4N mesh system and was going crazy trying to fix the random unavailability issue with all of them. I followed the instructions in the post: [Wireless] How to improve compatibility of IoT device with ASUS WiFi 6(AX) Router? | Official Support | ASUS Global and all have been rock solid since.

Thanks for the tipp, this solved my issues as well.
I also have UniFi WiFi and set a static IP on my router, no drops since.

if you have multiple APs, check your channels and potential interference? i’ve got an ESP device that kept going unavailable / offline until i locked it to the AP that is on channel 1 - turned out i had a neighbor’s wifi that was on channel 9, which seemed to cause interference any time the ESP connected to the APs that are on channels 6 or 11. only channel 1 gives me a solid connection.

There are 2 issues here. One is that ESPHome 12.xx can cause the ESP32s to drop off wifi regardless of whether a static IP is set. It doesn’t appear to be widespread but annoying if you’re affected (as I was). I was chasing interference/low signal strengths until I discovered this.

The 2nd is the ESP32 going offline in HA but remaining connected to the wifi AP. In my case this seems to have been fixed by going from setting the config to status_use_ping rather than rely on MDNS.

some additional details on my situation here;

TL;DR - i stabilized my network by adding ping sensors in HA to all of my esp boards, sending 2 packets every 45 seconds. they haven’t dropped off the network in the 21 hours since (knock on wood)…

i think @rockets has it correct: there’s a bug in esphome causing this, somewhere. there are a few issues open on it in github, but nothing seems to have come of it.

Actually I did manage to solve my issue here If you run a unifi access point and your ESP32s keep going offline. So far my ESPs have not dropped off since my last post (nearly 2 weeks)

You can shrink the binary further by removing ap: (Fallback Hotspot) and captive_portal:

2023.3.2 should hopefully improve this a bit for cases where the Wi-Fi isn’t actually dropping out.

If it’s still an issue we can also do

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Also if you can use the base esp-idf framework with your config it should save you quite a bit of ram usage on the esp.

I am running 2023.5.2 and the issue is still there.
After a year of using a very old 2022.2.x version with the airthings integration and having ZERO issues, I upgraded the ESP back in February and enabled BLE proxy, so I could run the airthings integration directly on HA (and get battery information, for instance, that’s not supported in the ESP integration) however every week or so the ESP would become unresponsive (unpingable) and needed to be restarted.

I’ve been upgrading it every month since then, with the hope that the stability issue would get resolved but no luck so far. It doesn’t look like a wifi problem as I have another ESP in a room closeby, same AP, and no issues whatsoever. That one is also running a BLE proxy that I use to detect beacon presence, so less heavy usage vs. airthings BLE.

I wonder if there is a stability/memory leak or the like type issue with the BLE proxy integration. Trying to stabilize this I added periodic reboots every few days to the problamatic esphome, this seems to extend the interval in-between problems, but is an ugly workaround.

Wondering if anyone is experiencing a similar issue pattern