InvisOutlet

DAE51D · January 26, 2025, 11:39pm

OT: @lawrence-intecular unrelated to our MQTT issue…

What is “Touch Control” and “Home Security” here? What do they do?

Also, does the device have a piezo “alarm” or any way of making sound? I ask because you detect CO2 but without an audible alert, this is kind of useless. I replaced the hallway AC receptacle with this InvisOutlet thinking I didn’t need my existing CO2 plug in alarm, but now I’m not sure; I’ve not heard this device make a peep so I don’t know if it even can. Similarly I can’t now use said CO plug-in box because it’s too big and covers up some of your sensors (it also seems to hose up the distance meter)…

Nor can I put our hallway emergency flashlight as that also blocks your 3 slots on each side (and causes the distance to be all jacked up)

Which brings me to another thing, the Motion detection is a bit wonky or else I don’t understand the three “buttons” there. “Motion Detection” (little person) lights up real fast; which is great. But the distance is suspect. It’ll say I’m some big distance away when I’m much closer. Also it changes; slowly; so by the time I move around it’s telling me the wrong distance (again). Does this see through walls? I ask because sometimes it thinks there is a distance but I assure you nobody is in this hallway. It would be great that once you get the accuracy dialed in, if I could define a distance that matters; for example, only alert if it’s < 5’ from the plug and I don’t care about people further than that as they are maybe walking past an open door in their bedroom but it still triggers this guy.

standing here about 6’ away

it said i was like 10’ initially, then 7’ then 5.9’ but it takes like a second or more for each re-calibration to happen. I would have expected more accuracy and faster updates thereof…

I think you guys mentioned this isn’t possible with the sensor you’re using, but defining multiple detection zones would be so great too…

what is the angle of detection? like is it from the wall and anything anywhere in that 180 degree arc? it feels like it is.

And I’m not understanding the redundant icons along the top under the title and then the same ones basically in the gray shaded box? But even more curious is they don’t always line up? Here you see the Airbnb LUX is 5 in both, but the Hallway shows 141 and 125 ?! huh?

The AQI one says “average” for one of them, so that sorta makes sense there that they’re different. Are the rest supposed to be average too, just not labeled as such?

PlayedIn · January 27, 2025, 1:40am

Useless? I will use the sensor to trigger an HA automation that will turn on my zwave siren and a sound alert on all of my HA wall panels speakers and send text notifications to the wall panels and our phones.

DAE51D · January 27, 2025, 3:30am

TL;DR: misunderstood the difference betwixt CO and CO2 as per this reply pointed out…

right. re-read what I wrote. “you detect CO2 but without an audible alert, this is kind of useless. I replaced the hallway AC receptacle with this InvisOutlet thinking I didn’t need my existing CO2 plug in alarm” but now I need it STILL as I’m not going to rely upon some automation to alert me if a CO2 leak. Yes it’s great to have as well for extra alerts, turning on lights, unlock a door or something, etc… but the real issue is if there’s a leak that is strong enough to trigger a stand-alone device, then we’re in some trouble and an alarm needs to sound every time immediately. If your HA is down, or the automation doesn’t trigger for any number of reasons and you don’t get that alarm and continue sleeping through a C02 leak; you may not wake up again… ever. I said what I said and I stand by it. Seems odd to omit a chirping piezo that is common in various devices of all shapes and sizes and costs pennies.

tmman · January 29, 2025, 5:29am

You should always have a REAL CO alarm in your house, don’t take chances. These sensors could be used to send a trigger to your phone as an alert if you’re not home… Something you wouldn’t require if you were.

tmman · January 29, 2025, 5:32am

I would recommend you further troubleshoot. Perhaps, turn off your image for 30 minutes to imitate a backup that takes half the time. Test it at different intervals and see if you can sort at what period of time it occurs.

DAE51D · January 29, 2025, 6:56pm

I kinda feel like I’ve troubleshooted enough. The issue is with the device, not me. It’s not retrying long enough or something. I’ve explained how it can be consistently repo’d. I’m sure I’m not the only person using Proxmox/HAOS and image backups (but I probably am in the smaller demographic that also uses this InvisOutlet currently). Other MQTT devices like my Ring cams and such all connect and work fine after the snapshots. If @lawrence-intecular and the team have a new firmware they want to push to me to test, I’m happy to do so, but otherwise not sure there’s much more I can provide in regard to what/why/how/when this is losing connection…

tmman · January 29, 2025, 7:24pm

Cool, do as you wish. Just thought I’d offer a suggestion to help the dev narrow things down for your particular situation. Any bug report would require the same. Let us know how it goes.

DAE51D · January 30, 2025, 10:19pm

@lawrence-intecular here’s another connectivity issue I’m now experiencing. I had to reset my ASUS GT-AX11000 router the other day. I have noticed that since then, ONE of the two plugs shows this globe icon and not the ↔ icon. Obviously haven’t touched the outlet as they’re hard-wired (is there a way to “reboot” it but not “factory reset” it as my other TPLink Kasa light switches have?).

This seems suboptimal as I can’t get to any of the menus

And ironically there is an option to reboot the outlet, but NOT when it’s in “cloud” mode ?! Why is this locked out when of all times, NOW is the time I need to reboot the device?!

however curiously the APP does show data moving so is this a BT connection or something?

The working one has this different modal popup

The wording seems odd too. Why would “local” be “better” than “cloud” connection? Seems local would be a BT or something only, whereas Cloud would be IP based but I digress…

Here’s what I SUSPECT is happening, maybe I’m wrong, but at least it’s somewhere to start to to look into as well for you guys… I have that beast ASUS ROG router in my home office top floor. The InvisOutlet in question is just outside my door here in the hallway. I have TWO ASUS LYRA pucks that act as a mesh to cover the whole house. The other working InvisOutlet is in the Airbnb bottom/3rd level. Illustrated here (the pucks have a CAT6 backhaul to the router)…

My theory is the Airbnb outlet is connected to the nearest puck which is also down there. That was NOT rebooted, therefore the outlet never lost connection to “something” (despite the puck lost CAT6 connection to the ASUS ROUTER for a bit while rebooting). But the one in the hallway probably connects to said router, and when that went away, so did the connection on the outlet and it just never recovered when the router comes back online? The fact it says “cloud” is throwing me off, but if the wording is confusing (as per above) then it makes sense as it’s really just a “local” BT to the app or something but not getting an IP and not able to do MQTT and all that. I verified some of this because I wrote an internal web page long ago that nmap scans for all my 136+ IOT devices and it ONLY shows the Airbnb InvisOutlet having an IP and on the LAN (normally both showed up before)

Participant · January 30, 2025, 10:33pm

The alarm you have plugged in is a Carbon MONOXIDE (CO) alarm. The smart plug is detecting Carbon DIOXIDE (CO₂).

The two gasses are not comparable in danger, and you cannot use this device to replace carbon monoxide alarms.

DAE51D · January 30, 2025, 10:47pm

AH!!! okay that makes some sense. LOL… but then my next question is, why do I care about CO2 detection/levels? In other words, that’s more like Global Warming/Climate Change stuff on an “Earth scale”. What does it mean in the context of my “Home scale”? And of course then, detecting the MONOXIDE would seem to make more sense in the outlet to reduce one more thing I have to plug in the wall no? Not to mention plugging a CO sensor into the receptacle appears to not only block either the top two side slits, or the bottom lighting indicators. Curious choice.

lawrence-intecular · January 30, 2025, 11:55pm

Hi @DAE51D ,

Thank you for the very detailed troubleshoot and analysis of what you’ve experienced.

I will try to answer couple questions here and our team is currently fixing most of the things for the firmware and the app.

The MQTT issue will be fixed in the next firmware update of the InvisOutlet, so please give us more time to get this fixed. We plan to have this ready by the end of next week.
The ↔ icon that you see on the app means it is locally connected (API), not remotely. As mDNS discovery may be slow in different Android OS, some device may need longer time to get discovered, hence showing the globe icon instead of the ↔ icon. This is working intended on the iOS app and we are working to find a better workaround for Android app in the meantime.
The Only available when locally connected. is an application limit, we will have those implemented as well in the future.
Touch Control is a feature where you can control the receptacle power via the two touch pads on the side of the receptacle, on the InvisDeco. Home Security is a feature where the InvisDeco will blink to scare intruders away when no households are in the house but intruders came in.

We are sorry for some of the issues that many are facing here, and we will try to fix these asap via firmware updates and mobile app updates.

Sincerely,
Lawrence from Intecular

DAE51D · January 31, 2025, 1:42am

@lawrence-intecular thank you for the reply and pending firmware fixes. As mentioned on one of the threads, happy to help if you want guinea pigs to push firmware too. Also I absolutely appreciate your replies and as a Sr. SW Engineer myself I fully understand that you can not possibly have every combination of test environment and all that. I also know this is a brand new device and there will be bugs to fix, so please don’t take any of my posts as anything more than trying to assist and make this (and future Intecular) devices as robust and user friendly as possible. …

lawrence-intecular · January 31, 2025, 1:49pm

Hi @DAE51D ,

The latest firmware (0.6.70) for InvisOutlet is out, please make sure you update your InvisHome app first and then update the device.

This update should fix the MQTT bug that most are experiencing. We’ve been running for couple days now and it’s running fine. Also tested with MQTT broker server turned off for couple minutes and back on and it also reconnected back to the broker with no issue.

If you have activated adaptive nightlight but controlled the nightlight either by HA or other methods, it will turn off adaptive nightlight feature automatically.

One thing I missed on the previous reply was you can restart your InvisOutlet by double-clicking the physical button, you should see it blink for 3 seconds and it will restart.

Let me know how this new firmware goes and if you still experience issues with your MQTT setup.

Thank you.

Sincerely,
Lawrence from Intecular

Participant · January 31, 2025, 5:35pm

High CO₂ levels indicate you need some ventilation. Too much CO₂ is not good for you either, but a lot more is required to kill you versus CO and it’s a lot more likely you can get yourself to safety from noticing the effects yourself with CO₂ vs CO.

To get to the *immediately dangerous" level of CO₂ in the context of a home, I think you’d probably need the house to be on fire, in which case, either the heat or the carbon monoxide generated is going to get you first.

Here’s a chart of the PPM concentrations of CO. If your outlet was measuring that instead of CO₂, you’d already be dead.

DAE51D · January 31, 2025, 6:03pm

@lawrence-intecular I’m sad to say, it did NOT fix the MQTT issue. I was elated to see an app update and even more when I saw a firmware update. I immediately updated both outlets about 11pm last night; excited to see them still working in the morning in HA/MQTT. Unfortunately that is not the case.

What’s curious is that the backup doesn’t take all that long. And even with a shutdown/backup/restart I’d guess it’s still under 10 minutes total…

121: 2025-01-31 05:15:05 INFO: Starting Backup of VM 121 (qemu)
121: 2025-01-31 05:15:05 INFO: status = running
121: 2025-01-31 05:15:05 INFO: backup mode: stop
121: 2025-01-31 05:15:05 INFO: ionice priority: 7
121: 2025-01-31 05:15:05 INFO: VM Name: HomeAssistant
121: 2025-01-31 05:15:05 INFO: include disk 'virtio0' 'local-nvme:vm-121-disk-1' 60G
121: 2025-01-31 05:15:05 INFO: include disk 'efidisk0' 'local-nvme:vm-121-disk-0' 4M
121: 2025-01-31 05:15:05 INFO: stopping virtual guest
121: 2025-01-31 05:15:33 INFO: creating vzdump archive '/mnt/pve/local-backup/dump/vzdump-qemu-121-2025_01_31-05_15_05.vma.zst'
121: 2025-01-31 05:15:33 INFO: starting kvm to execute backup task
121: 2025-01-31 05:15:35 INFO: started backup task '06055bf5-c0a3-4515-9e63-b65989dbc297'
121: 2025-01-31 05:15:35 INFO: resuming VM again after 30 seconds
121: 2025-01-31 05:15:38 INFO:   0% (561.9 MiB of 60.0 GiB) in 3s, read: 187.3 MiB/s, write: 168.7 MiB/s
121: 2025-01-31 05:15:41 INFO:   1% (1.1 GiB of 60.0 GiB) in 6s, read: 192.1 MiB/s, write: 139.1 MiB/s
121: 2025-01-31 05:15:44 INFO:   2% (1.7 GiB of 60.0 GiB) in 9s, read: 194.6 MiB/s, write: 149.5 MiB/s
121: 2025-01-31 05:15:47 INFO:   3% (2.2 GiB of 60.0 GiB) in 12s, read: 177.1 MiB/s, write: 146.3 MiB/s
.....
121: 2025-01-31 05:19:55 INFO:  97% (58.2 GiB of 60.0 GiB) in 4m 20s, read: 448.7 MiB/s, write: 174.3 MiB/s
121: 2025-01-31 05:19:58 INFO:  99% (59.5 GiB of 60.0 GiB) in 4m 23s, read: 441.0 MiB/s, write: 375.9 MiB/s
121: 2025-01-31 05:20:01 INFO: 100% (60.0 GiB of 60.0 GiB) in 4m 26s, read: 160.8 MiB/s, write: 122.2 MiB/s
121: 2025-01-31 05:20:01 INFO: backup is sparse: 18.05 GiB (30%) total zero data
121: 2025-01-31 05:20:01 INFO: transferred 60.00 GiB in 266 seconds (231.0 MiB/s)
121: 2025-01-31 05:20:01 INFO: archive file size: 13.45GB
121: 2025-01-31 05:20:01 INFO: adding notes to backup
121: 2025-01-31 05:20:01 INFO: prune older backups with retention: keep-last=14
121: 2025-01-31 05:20:01 INFO: removing backup 'local-backup:backup/vzdump-qemu-121-2025_01_16-05_27_24.vma.zst'
121: 2025-01-31 05:20:02 INFO: pruned 1 backup(s) not covered by keep-retention policy
121: 2025-01-31 05:20:02 INFO: Finished Backup of VM 121 (00:04:57)

you can see this timestamp lines up where it stopped working. something we already knew basically, but what I’m also noticing is that the FIRMWARE says 0.6.64 here BUT the app shows 0.6.70 … so why the discrepancy? Was I supposed to do something else here (as in restart something?) Obvi HA is restarting after the backup from a clean boot (meaning it’s a stop/backup/start, not a suspend/backup or something like that as I was hitting corrupt backups that way)…

UPDATE-ish… so yeah, @lawrence-intecular I restarted the outlets and NOW MQTT shows the right firmware and is getting data… this is encouraging, but I won’t know until tomorrow after 5:15AM PST if this firmware actually fixed the issue since that’s when the backup will happen again… will update here of course. #fingerscrossed…

One more thing is you say:

Also tested with MQTT broker server turned off for couple minutes and back on and it also reconnected back to the broker with no issue.

Have you tested it for LONG periods, maybe 30 minutes or hours or days even? If you’re truly only testing for 2 minutes, then I’m 5x longer than that, so maybe there is still an issue there… TBD I guess we’ll know tomorrow

DAE51D · January 31, 2025, 6:30pm

@lawrence-intecular you’re not going to like this either… I noticed NOW after restarting the outlet, the “deco” isn’t responding to motion or other things anymore and doesn’t show its firmware or anything (as the screenshots above did)

tried restarting the outlet with the double-tap button as well as in the app and also restarting the deco in the app. nothing brings it back …

UPDATE: so after trying to “restart” and “reset” the deco, finally i just tried to yank off the plate from the plug. I couldn’t figure out HOW to do that exactly with this push/pull business. BUT whatever torquing I did seemed to have reset it the hardway and so now I get firmware and updates again.

lawrence-intecular · February 1, 2025, 12:07am

Hi @DAE51D,

We have others that experienced the InvisDeco being offline after the software update, we are still investigating why this is happening. If this happens next time, try to pull the right side of the InvisDeco a bit until it loses power, without unsnapping it, this will do the power reset the hard way.

For MQTT, so far we are getting positive results from other users. We are also testing long-period testing with MQTT broker being offline and restoring it back to online now. Let me know if MQTT still isn’t working for you after the InvisDeco is now back online.

UPDATE: After testing with HA being offline for 30 minutes and goes back online, the device can connect back to HA with no issues. We will continue to monitor what happens in the next few days with MQTT.

Sincerely,
Lawrence from Intecular

DAE51D · February 1, 2025, 11:29pm

@lawrence-intecular I noticed late LATE last night (or I guess early this morning maybe like 1am or something) you released a 0.6.71 up from the 0.6.70, so I updated only ONE of the outlets just to see if one firmware worked and the other didn’t or whatever. Turns out the .71 DID work (as in this afternoon when I woke up I see data in MQTT ! woo hoo! The .70 had the same old issue. HOWEVER just now I noticed that HA still said 0.6.64 in MQTT despite your app showing 0.6.70, so I toggled MQTT in your app and now HA shows 0.6.70. I’m doing this to let it run tonight on that (outdated) firmware JUST to see if that version was the true fix, or if the point bump was the actual working one… will post an update tomorrow.

UPDATE: IDK why but that hallway one said .64 again and so never got to test the .70 firmware. I gave up and flashed it to .71 (since that’s the only option now anyways) and they’ve been solid the past few days and every day I check I see data for both outlets now. I believe this bug has been squashed. Thank you to your team.

I never re-tested the wifi signal one as that is pretty disruptive to my whole smarthome of 136 devices, but that day will come i’m sure as every so often ASUS pushes a firmware and borks things up until I reboot the router it seems

trevor.28582 · February 4, 2025, 11:12pm

I am very happy to see quick updates, and I appreciate the MQTT settings no longer being on a nested menu.

I am still not having luck with MQTT, and device is showing always detecting motion/occupancy.

Keep the updates coming! loving having an accurate temp sensor, that doesnt seem to be disrupted even by high draw things plugged in.

I do seem to have duplicate entities after the last update, but I hope those will clear up.

lawrence-intecular · February 5, 2025, 2:25am

Hi @trevor.28582 ,

Really appreciate more feedback on InvisOutlet with HA!
Matter doesn’t play too well with HA and we recommend to delete all Matter-related endpoints for our device and connect using MQTT.

Can you give that a try and see if that works for you?

The latest firmware version is 0.6.71, we do found a bug where the outlet and nightlight status will get reset to off when there’s a reconnection back to the MQTT broker. That will be fixed in the next update.

Thank you!

Sincerely,
Lawrence from Intecular