(Sorry for the length, but I thought that others might benefit from the mistakes I made just getting to the major problem… Sigh… My inability to describe steps-to-repro doesn’t help… Sigh…)
Hi! I’ve acquired a three-pack of TP-Link Tapo P125M (Matter-capable) mini smart plugs and am having difficulty adding them to my Home Assistant instance.
I’m running HA on a 8GB Raspberry Pi 4B with Home Assistant OS 10.3 & Home Assistant Core 2023.7.3 and the latest Matter integration.
I am running a TP-Link Deco XE75 mesh 3-unit configuration (under IPv4 & IPv6) over three floors (including basement).
The plugs must first be “brought up” (“commissioned”?) using the Tapo app which gets them on the Wi-Fi network, names them, updates their firmware, and allows them to be controlled via the app. (Or, at least, that is my understanding that this is a necessary first step… Advise if I am incorrect.)
Next, I was under the understanding that you then needed to “bring up” into a 3rd party hub (eg: Apple Homekit running the “new” Apple Home architecture) before attempting to add to HA. It took a while for me to realize the requirement for the new architecture… SIgh… (Lesson learned: If you intend on using Apple Home, ensure your architecture is current!)
And there seemed to be a naming issue: they all initially internally had a name like “Mini Smart Plug” and you couldn’t get to the point of renaming them, causing confusion. I had to restore HA from backups which I believe got rid of the conflicting instances. Until things seem to be more stable, I’m running a backup between device additions so I can more easily recover.
And then I realized I didn’t have to go through the 3rd party hub, but directly into HA… Sigh…
So, “bringing up” into HA for the first plug (device1) was a hit-and-miss affair and chewed up a number of days. The device would sometime wouldn’t be added to HA, sometimes it would, while other times it would disappear overnight… Sigh… However, I finally got the device added and it didn’t disappear. Yay! I then successfully added device2 and it lasted overnight. Double yay!
Now, I’m sure you can predict that device3 refuses to be added to HA. Sigh…
I read in the integration notes that it’s sensitive to network issues. Even though I’m performing the additions right next to mesh nodes, could that be my problem?
Any other ideas?
TIA!