My experience is totally different with esphome. It works like a charm here and I’m planing to add more esphome devices. I don’t have any issues with it but I don’t have a lot of devices, only 7. 5 of those I build or flashed my self. And i do really like it.
The problem that might you are facing is bad wifi coverage. As I switched on Openwrt and created mesh wifi system around my house I don’t have any more problems with wifi connections and all wifi devices are working without any issues.
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Good point! Most of “stock” provider’s modems/routers can’t cope with big number of wifi clients at the same time, so they begin to drop connections. For 50+ devices a good (read expensive) additional router is a must, while provider’s box serves merely as modem.
In general, Richard really never gave much to work with, other than message to the forum that he’s leaving esphome (like his hardware, example yaml…).
Many people have problems with various things, and here on this forum pretty much all of them managed to solve them with the help of knowledgeable guys here. But “Where there’s a will, there’s a way” works other way around here: there IS a way, but only if there’s a will…
FWIW, I’m not unwilling to troubleshoot, I’m only unwilling to troubleshoot again here. I don’t mean to frustrate anyone.
I appreciate the conversation and it has raised my awareness for the many potential points of failure in ESPhome:
- router-wifi
- power supply
- power cable
- esp hardware
- sensor hardware
- ESPhome yaml
- for wired upload - serial driver and settings, data cable, maybe usb port
- ESPhome code
- Home Assistant code
That’s a lot of variables, particularly when they work in combination and problems can be intermittent. I’m not a software engineer, but I wonder if it would be possible to add logic to ESPhome that could provide more feedback about how well things are working and thereby reduce the list of concerns.
For the record, I’m using Unifi UDM-Pro and my wifi works perfectly for everything else. I have a large group of Shelly devices with no problems, and a Zigbee2MQTT network that is also reliable.
Those technologies provide good examples for ‘stability’.
- A couple of years ago, Unifi updates were like playing Russian roulette and many people were forced into factory resets. (Unifi updates are still slightly suspect)
- Earlier generations of Shelly devices were problematic and I had a box with dozens of dead soldiers until I threw them out. The current generation is problem-free so far.
- I waited to get on the Zigbee train and it has been pretty good for me.
- For me, MQTT has been rock-solid reliable from day one.
Some have asked what I would use to replace ESPhome. Frankly, I’m not sure. I use four or five Raspberry Pi devices for various things, but I’ve gotten over the “look at what my tiny computer can do” phase. [I thought about buying a pi 5 with maximum memory until I realized that for the same price I can buy a MiniPC that is far more capable for what I needed.]
In short, I’m open to ideas, particularly anything with data that runs through wires. Thanks.
Hm… i have asus rt-ax88u pro, but i’ve had to tweak 2.4Ghz wifi settings in order for esp’s to work flawlessly…
Regarding “what to replace esphome with”? …hm…pretty much nothing. Nothing except esphome will give you so much freedom in designing your nodes. I like esphome exactly because of that: my nodes work as I WANT, not as some developer wants…
Have the same. This router is only good on paper. Thank god someone found a way how to hack this thing and run custom scripts on it.
This router is excellent, not only on paper but in real world, too (especially when you put Marlin FW on it), the problem are esp’s which have only basic 2.4GHz wifi, while asus have tons of extra functions. On asus site you can find tutorial what to set for IOT, and there are other sites. For start you need to disable all that fancy extra "modulation scheme (turbo QAM, nitroQAM…)…etc…
No it is not. You cant modify firewall rules for example. I have esphome devices on different vlan and there is nothing you can do about firewall rules blocking communication between vlan and main network. Except using custom scripts.
I tried merlin but i’m not that impressed. Maybe my expectations were too high but you can’t set up vlan ssid using merlin firmware in gui. You have to use custom scripts for that. I mean it is easier to do it on Openwrt then on merlin firmware.
Maybe i expected too much from it but for 300 € this is way too bad.
For me this was the worst purchase I ever done, ever worst then alexa. And alexa put scale very high.
And yeah.
It can’t handle tagged and untagged traffic on the same lan port.
I’d say so, yes. Although it’s expensive it’s still “too cheap” to have these functions…
Yeah I saw this and this is one of the main reason I switched to Openwrt.
This doesn’t make sense. For that kind of money you can easily buy 2 wifi 6 routers new that run openwrt or even more if you go with used routers or wifi 5 routers.
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When you get over your frustration, which can be very hard, and you want to figure out the problem create a new thread.
There are many things that could be wrong, without more information it is impossible to say which ones might be causing your issues.
A far as temperature goes, I have had good results with the DS18B20, but they do take some work. I also have BME280 sensors, which can have issues with self-heating. I did read the datasheet very closely and fix the code for that many years ago. I have several Bluetooth and now Zigbee devices that generally work okay, even in the refrigerator and freezer. They all took some work to get to the reliable state.
@RichardU I do have one final question. If you don’t want to troubleshoot, what was your intention with this thread?
Was it to see if others are frustrated too?
Was it to challenge others from your perception of their complacency?
Something else?
Have you achieved your goal for this post/question/statement?
I was gonna suggest adding router settings to your list before I spotted this. There’s an entire thread in these forums about Unifi & ESP not playing well together with the default settings. Same goes for Shelly+Unifi.
Follow the recommendations in that thread and make sure that you have separate 2.4 & 5G networks set up and that you have channel width set to 20for the 2.4G network
That does not have wifi built in. How many access points are you using and what type?
I have the same router setup in as aimesh system. What were the tweaks you did to the 2.4 Ghz settings?
Thanks.
Bill
I have mesh, too. Beside this one as main router i also have two RT-AC86 and one RT-AX88U (that one is in AP mode because it started to have problems running as main router…)
I searched and found a couple of sites, explaining what to do, disable… for start
THIS asus site, and
THIS topic on snb forums
are two of them.
Additionally i found out that 2.4GHz wifi channel MUST be manually fixed to one channel. Having it to auto causes some (not all) modules to go offline each time router changes wifi channel. Some of them did connect after a while, some didn’t and I’ve had to do a manual reset.
I found out that some esp’s (again, not all) also don’t like border wifi channels, like ch1, or ch12-13… and they won’t connect to that channel (at least not for a while). I set mine to ch6 and now i have to dropouts.
And, of course, fixed IP’s on all esp’s is a must. In fact, pretty much all things, running in HA live way better with fixed IP on the device, or if it’s not possible to set it in the device, then fixing/reserving IP inside router. Not doing that you’re just calling for problems (sooner or later).
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There’s nothing wrong with using channel 1.
You should only use the non overlapping channels 1, 6 and 11.
Except if your neighbours are complete asses who don’t follow this scheme.
Yeah, i theory… my experiences are, as said, different. Using ch1 resulted that couple of esp’s didn’t connect, using ch11 other few didn’t. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that i mostly use esp’s from aliexpress, but using ch6 was the only way to achieve stable connections to all my nodes (over 50 i guess).
My neighbours… well, most of them use “auto”, most of them only have provider’s modem as router. That results in all possible ch combo’s… Luckily i live in standalone house, so i don’t have many neighbours, so wifi is not (too) congested.
I thought “auto” was programmed to use 1, 6 and 11. Guess it depends on the manufacturer.
I use all three channels (I have four access points) and don’t have any issues. I do pay a bit more for quality boards though (QuinLED ESP32s). There’s a topic that lists the better boards here: What's your favourite ESP32 board? (# Best, good, cheap, quality, reliable)
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I have one board that has this channel issue it will only connect to channel 1, all the others and there are plenty have no issues. I put it down to position rather than hardware though, might rethink that now.
OK, here goes, since this topic seem to be anecdotal, mostly:
I have a Unifi router and 3 of their APs. One AP is provided by the router. Another one is wired to the router and the third is meshed (using roaming, etc.). I have a variety of ESPHome devices (ESP32 and ESP8266). They all use DHCP and mDNS. The SSID of my 5GHz network is the same as the 2.4GHz one.
No problems.
4 AP’s with 2.4GHz on channel 1, 5, 9, 13 and 5GHz with the same SSID. Around 100 esphome devices and around 
problems 
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