I have three Matter-over-Thread Eve Energy receptacles installed. All were installed without issue and have been active for over a month. Tonight, I realized two of the three devices were showing offline. I’ve had this issue a couple times in the past and a reboot of all Thread Border Routers (4x Google Nest Hub, 1x Skyconnect) has always fixed the issue (this time the issue was likely caused because one of the TBRs was unplugged). However, this time rebooting the TBRs did not bring the devices back online.
I toggled the circuit breakers for those two circuits next. This brought all entities for the two receptacles back online, except for the firmware update entity, which is showing as ‘Unknown’ state. The third Eve Energy receptacle that never dropped offline is still showing the ‘Update’ entity correctly.
All three receptacles are running Firmware v3.3.0 on Hardware v1.1 (2024.10.2 HAOS).
Any idea what could have caused this issue and how to fix the ‘Update’ entity on the two problematic receptacles?
I would assume the entity remains “unknown” until the device has polled the server for the latest firmware version. If I were a IoT manufacturer, I would set the polling to a random interval between 1-2 weeks to keep access to the server low and identify issues early before many of the devices out there have been updated.
There have been some issues known by the developers when the HA OTBR is in the same Thread network as other TBRs. It is thought to be a combination of weak signal, and TREL not quite working as hoped for. Here is a thread if interested.
Thank you, this was very helpful. I found a post in that thread from someone who also has Unifi network equipment and that turning off Multicast Enhancement fixed the issue for them.
I knew when I set up my thread network that leaving ME on could cause issues, but decided to test leaving it enabled to cut back on network chatter. All seemed fine; Matter devices provisioned on the first try every time and everything seemed to run fine with it enabled. That is until a TBR was unplugged…
Seems like TREL is likely the cause (as you suggested) and devices were not switching TBRs like they should when one is dropped. I believe Multicast Enhancement was the culprit for me as well (this time at least), because as soon as I disabled it, the update entities for the two problematic Eve Energy devices resolved normally.
For others with this issue, my network is configured as follows:
Primary wifi → ‘LAN’, ‘Guest’, or ‘IoT’ network (based on pre-shared key)
IoT_2.4GHz wifi → ‘IoT’ network
IoT_5GHz wifi → ‘IoT’ network
Disabling Multicast Enhancement on my ‘IoT_2.4GHz’ and ‘IoT_5GHz’ wireless networks fixed the issue. Multicast Enhancement is still enabled for the primary wifi network for what it’s worth.