InvisOutlet

Has anyone heard anything about this new product? Seems to support MQTT and has many different sensor options.

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i just saw this today, looks pretty awesome! cant wait for some reviews

Anybody get one yet?

I finally received my InvisOutlet last week and got it installed this weekend. Construction-wise, it is well made, sturdy and nice aesthetically. It was easy to wire up and pairing it with HomeKit (Matter) was seamless. HOWEVER, the only sensors that showed up in the Home app were occupancy, temp, humidity, and (I think?) illumination. If you pair it with the InvisHome app, the outlet can report all of those as well as motion, distance, AQI, CO2, VOC, and pressure. BUT my particular outlet so far has been stuck “calibrating” the gas/air quality sensors for days now without a single readout. I have been thus far unable to add it to Home Assistant when it is paired with InvisHome. It has the configuration fields to enter MQTT server and credentials, but it has yet to be discovered by my server. I’ve reached out to Intecular support but haven’t heard back in a few days. Will update.

I just received mine a week ago as well, and have yet to mess with it. I’m disappointed to hear your experience. @Kevin_Patrick. Please keep us updated if you hear back from support. I think not including a usb-c plug to the outlet was a big miss on this product. Overall, this kick starter has been a frustrating one (delivered over a year past the initial promised date), so was really hoping the execution would make up for it!

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A second attempt to contact support via email is still unanswered. I was able to integrate the outlet with HomeKit and HA over Matter by removing it from the InvisOutlet app, adding it to HomeKit, then putting it in pairing mode to add to HA and back to InvisOutlet. Still no reliable Air Quality data registering. The occupancy sensor is also completely unreliable. It reports occupancy when the room is empty and sometimes empty when I’m in bed. Hopefully they can fix this with software updates but I won’t hold my breath

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I just got one of these up and running. I’m running the local Matter server (using the SkyConnect USB dongle).

I initially added it to the InvisOutlet app to make sure everything was working, but then reset the outlet (hold middle button for 10 seconds) to clear that, and added it HA using this flow.

Here’s what shows up in HA; note there are a bunch of sensors that either don’t work, or haven’t updated/calibrated yet, as per @Kevin_Patrick’s experience. The Controls (1 + 2) allow for switching the outlets on and off. Not sure what all the Configuration items do yet.

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I used the “Re-interview Device” option, which for some reason duplicated all of the Sensors and Configuration items, but the new ones worked “properly” (had values, seem to update). I deleted all the previous ones which were “no longer provided by the integration”.

I got my two outlets as well and I just installed one this morning, the MQTT functionality is 100% broken :frowning: I was able to find a matter QR code share under the configuration cog for the outlet and then “turn on pairing window” and it went right over to HA. Though my outlet died and I had to flip the breaker and reshare it back to HA. Like @beaulebens is having I don’t have all of the sensors showing therefor MQTT is the way to go but it’s simply not working, I haven’t broken out pcaps yets but I tried DNS and IPs and I’m on the same subnet /23 but still the same subnet and no dice. I’m quite disappointed on that front. Neat product overall.

We have MQTT now!!!

Support responded back within a few hours and it’s not obvious int he UI at all but enter it in like so mqtt://homeassistant.local:1883 I used my local DNS and it showed up within seconds and I have full sensor data unlike Matter.

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I realized I wasn’t getting through to MQTT because I wasn’t using mqtt:// for the address. I think MQTT is the way to go with this device. Matter leaves off some of the sensors, and creates so many duplicates, I can’t keep track of which is active or not.

I just got my two outlets yesterday and wired them up today physically and in app earlier…

…And just now in HA via MQTT. The trick I didn’t realize is the MQTT menu is buried at the bottom this other “customizations” menu, as yet another menu :frowning_face:

That’s where you add the credentials etc…

Also, don’t forget to SAVE. There seems to be a few too many “save” buttons and toggles IMHO, so be sure to scroll down the screen and make sure you’re getting all the things! sliders, buttons, save in the modal, save outside the modal… oy vey…

But now things look good and despite the clunky way of getting here, it appears to work and display values thus far. I haven’t tried to wire in any automatons yet to see their stability. I say that because I have some devices, like my Tapo Cameras that come to mind that show all the entities and such, but are just flakey AF and sometimes they trigger and other times they don’t it seems. But I digress…

Whoa! noice! I didn’t expect this… if you hit the IP in your web browser, you get a nice little panel


OT: Side note, I tried to link the “Invis” Alexa skill and the Google one and both failed to link (it feels like a their-server kinda issue).

wellll that was a short lived high… today all my sensors and such for BOTH devices shows like this :angry: – seems to have stopped sending data around 5:13AM. Tried rebooting HA to no avail.

The app DOES show values changing however.

Ideas on how to get this to work with MQTT again? … Okay, so while typing this, I figured I’d just toggle MQTT off/save/on/save in their app and sure enough…

I really hope this is a glitch and not normal. The other “horror” I hope it is not is that every night my HA which is a VM on Proxmox, “shutdown” so that Proxmox can do a backup/snapshot, then it starts up again. I hope that isn’t causing the device to lose the connection and doesn’t retry it again… That would be a serious bug on InvisOutlet’s part… in fact, now that I say this, and knowing that suss time of ~5am, I’m betting this is exactly what’s happening. :thinking:

Hi Daevid,

Thank you for the detailed instructions for InvisOutlets for the HA community!

We do get feedbacks on the MQTT that it may not be stable overtime and we are looking into the reason why this is happening. In our labs, we are using Raspberry Pi as the HA hub and it has been doing fine for more than a month, we have also tried shutting off the Wi-Fi and the Raspberry Pi but the InvisOutlet’s MQTT still survived and can reconnect back to HA with no issue.

Please allow us some time to find the reason behind it and we will push a fix to the next firmware update.

Thank you again for choosing InvisOutlet!

Sincerely,
Lawrence from Intecular

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I haven’t tried setting up MQTT yet on this, but on Matter I am definitely getting inaccurate readings on Occupancy. It’s constantly detecting as occupied, when the room it’s in is definitely not. I had an automation based on that and had to disable because it’s too inconsistent.

Thanks @lawrence-intecular for the reply. The reason is already explained in my bottom comment if that helps get a fix in sooner. :wink:

every night my HA which is a VM on Proxmox, is “shutdown” so that Proxmox can do an image backup/snapshot of said VM, then it starts up again. I suspect that is causing the InvisOutlet to lose the connection to MQTT, but then it doesn’t retry it again… or at least it’s not retrying enough or long enough (the backup may take maybe an hour let’s say). But IMHO the device should just continually try every few minutes or something “forever” if it loses connection to something it already had a good connection too as most likely the MQTT server has gone down and will come up again eventually right? Case in point. :wink:

This is verified by the fact that by toggling your app’s MQTT slider, it picked right up and HA started showing values again (without doing anything in HA that was rebooted last night as part of it’s daily image backup). Does this make sense and jive with your assessment given the above information and your knowledge of your devices MQTT try/fail/retry logic?

Oh wait. I just re-read this bit of your comment… Interesting as that’s similar to this setup effectively, but you have different positive results… :thinking:

we have also tried shutting off the Wi-Fi and the Raspberry Pi but the InvisOutlet’s MQTT still survived and can reconnect back to HA with no issue.

So this is only day 1 of this setup being installed and working, maybe it was just a fluke on my end then but I’ll see tomorrow morning if the Outlet is connected to HA again or not and that will tell us more data.

Thank you for being active in this community and building a device “specifically” with us in mind! <3

So just verified that today I see the same issue as yesterday with no data. I restart MQTT in the IvisOutlet and it populates again (as expected).

I’ve now taken my HA out of the daily backup and I’ll see if tomorrow the MQTT is working (also I expect it will be)… but this will verify/confirm where the trouble lies in the reconnect logic of the plug…

also note the bottom logs where that 5:13am shutdown is, and that aligns with the last data HA saw in the earlier screenshot (on the far right side)

Hi all, just jumping on here, as it was referenced by support.

I tried running the outlet through matter. Had double entities show up off the bat, but I could ignore those. After about a day, they entries that I had configured for my automations had become invalid. I noticed a new set of entries was added that was being updated.

I was recommended using MQTT, will do just that for the time being.
But since Matter is being advertised, it should just work.

Do want to note, that I had to add the full url and port to get it to work. (mqtt://url:1883).
It would be nice to be able to change the update time.

Occupancy and motion does not seem to be working.

UPDATE: @lawrence-intecular so as not to keep adding posts to the thread, but as expected, NOT having my HA shutdown by Proxmox to take the 15GB image results in MQTT was showing just fine today. Therefore there’s definitely some kind of race condition or the Outlet is not retrying to connect for long enough till the backup job is finished or the socket/port/something that the outlet tries to use is now stale (terminated) and it needs to do whatever that toggle off/save/toggle on/save does to refresh it’s connection to the new socket/port/something when HA eventually restarts after the backup (which may take minutes or even an hour(s) to be safe). Looking forward to this getting fixed as my two options now are either NO backups of my HA every night (most likely not a viable option), or manually restarting Outlet via the app every day to get the stats (also not likely to happen)

Just chiming in, I powered mine on tonight, and it is still calibrating.
I connected with Invis app, updated firmware, and then tried to setup MQTT (with full url) and my MQTT broker is not seeing anything. I tried many permutations of SAVE back out SAVE, turn off MQTT, SAVE, out, SAVE, etc…
Currently connected with matter, and waiting for things to calibrate, but eager to get Mqtt going.
I also dont see a way to change things like nightlight in HA through Matter, would like to see that.