I spoke to support (someone that seemed very knowledgeable) and he seemed uninterested in getting any data from me. Saw similar reports on Reddit and other websites and no one appears to have gotten any where with Kohler. Since this board is their first one with Internet access maybe they feel they will fix it with a new board release rather than fixing it in firmware.
I agree with @masto, let’s do some testing. Here is what I’d do.
- Test disconnecting the Ethernet cable. Do the HASS entities go unavailable (they should since I coded a fix for that which is in latest release)? How long does that take (should < 5 minutes, if you speed up the poll cycle from the 10 minute default)? Plug cable back in, do entities become available? Try this a couple times with variation (unplug for 30 seconds, etc.). Make sure you are unplugging it from whatever switch it’s plugged into, we want the Ethernet hardware to sense the loss of connection.
I assuming you have a hard wired cable not there wireless solution?
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Set up ping sensor in HASS to ping the generator with an alert Maybe every 10 seconds, this will be your monitor for it disconnecting.
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Repeat the tests in (1) when the ping sensor has failed.
If you have the ability, capture the network traffic from the generator when it’s in a failed state, this way we can verify it’s in a hung state (no traffic) vs trying some operation that it repeatedly failing. You’ll need to run this packet capture on the switch it’s plugged into, or use an “Ethernet TAP” to monitor the wire.
- Put in a cheap router, plug the generator into it and plug it’s “internet” into your existing router. Run the above tests.
The ha integration is a cloud integration. Ha entities gets the information from the oncue cloud app. My generator only communicates to the Kohler site through a wired connection. I have no other options on my system. Once the wire is disconnected there is no information sent to Home Assistant.
Maybe the question should be if the generator disconnects from the internet does it reconnect? Sometimes mine does and sometimes it doesn’t. I see no way of forcing the reconnection other than a cold boot or a reflash of the firmware. Neither is a good option for me.
I have had four disconnects in the last year all where during some Comcast issue where my router (s) lost the internet.
Yes, I understand how the integration works as I’ve written some of the code for it. Hence as one of the code owners I’m trying to help us get to the bottom of the issue. Building a local connection seems possible based on captures I’ve seen, but it would take more time than I have now.
The tests as outlined allow us to make sure the system works from gen->cloud->hass and that the behavior you have is the same as what I have.
Based on your observations, you may also want to pull your internet cable out to simulate the comcast issue.
I have done this in the past and it did not reconnect. I can try again if you think I can get any useful data for you. Last time it went out (last week) Comcast updated something and the internet was down from 4AM to around 4:30 AM. Everything (60+ devices) came back except the generator. Maybe it is a timing issue that if the generator is trying to connect and fails it stops trying?
If we can confirm that pulling the internet cable out of your comcast modem causes this to happen 100% of the time - that would be progress. When you have time that would be a good controlled test. Try different intervals, maybe we can find that threshold?
Then I and others can try the same thing with our router and see if I get the same behavior - I don’t have comcast. That will allow us to know if it’s a general problem or something specific to your environment.
Are you asking me to disconnect the modem or disconnect the generator? Nick also had similar issues. Either way, I won’t be able to get to this until the first of the week
Ideally both. I know it’s time consuming. I have tested disconnecting the cable from the generator into my router a lot when I was doing the install and working on the availability change. Having you repeat that test would be good as it should work.
Next, testing by disconnecting the internet cable from the router, simulating the comcast outages will determine if it is repeatable. It would also be helpful to understand the threshold. Does outage occur with a 1 minute disconnect? 10 minute, etc. With a repeatable scenario on your equipment, I can repeat on my equipment which will tell us if it’s potentially a general issue or something specific with your generator / comcast modem.
In addition to trying to be helpful, I also know that this issue will occur on my system at the most inopportune time, like the middle of an ice storm when I’m 200 miles away. So getting an handle on it and determining how to recover / avoid the issue will be helpful.
I’ll start by disconnecting the generator from the router. 1 min, 5 min, 10 min, 20 min, until it fails. I believe it will without disconnecting the modem, but we will see.
“So getting an handle on it and determining how to recover / avoid the issue will be helpful”
Preventing maybe possible, not sure but according to Kohler recovery is not possible without reflasing or cold boot.
By the way the integration reports latest firmware as 2.0.6 and I know I installed (several times) Rdc2v4_3_1_1.bin.
I don’t think that test will fail as I’ve ran it a lot. Losing the media (aka cable) is different failure than having the media working and the destination unreachable; the software mechanism to detect and handle are different. So if it turns out it’s ok with media disconnect but fails when the internet is out for more than 10 minutes (default timeout in most network stacks) then we have the problem described. And the simple solve is to get a powered switch and some sort of smart plug (zwave, WiFi, etc.); set up a ping sensor in HASS for the kohler cloud when it fails turn the switch off; when recovers turn the switch back on and that will prevent the failure mode. But first we need the test data.
Before running the test below can you verify your firmware? Mine reports in the app 2.0.6 but the file I used is 3.1.1. if the firmware is the issue this might be the easier fix.
New test parameters.
1.Disconnect generator for 11 minutes - reconnect
If successful
2. Disconnect modem for 11 minutes
If sussuful
3. Disconnect generator for 15 minutes
If sussuful
4.Disconnect modem for 15 minutes
If sussuful
5. Disconnect generator for 20 minutes
If sussuful
6. Disconnect modem for 20 minutes
3.01 is what is on my generator.
Any ideal why the app shows 2.06 as latest firmware?
I’d say the app has bugs.
I did a modem reboot ( less than 5 minutes). Everything came back on line except the Kohler generator.
Just that one test or did some of the others work?
This test was not planned. I was seeing something flaky with the internet after the beta HA update. It was a Comcast issue as I saw the modem lights lose connections a couple of more time after I rebooted it. These loses were for 3 to 4 minutes max. I did not get a chance to test anything that I planned. I’ll try and test the generator connection later today after I get it reconnected.
I noticed on one of the internet sights (still searching for a solution), that they said their generator checked in every hour on the hour. I’m wondering if internet was down at this time would this keep it down? I did not have this information when I rebooted or Comcast was having issues so I did not note the time.
Ok. Sounds good. I have rebooted the pfsense router that my Gen is connected to and that works fine.
I have not tried rebooting the internet router. I’ll try that next week. Pulling the cable from the generator will be a good test. It could be a hardware problem with the physical Ethernet port on either the generator / comcast modem or a protocol meltdown (dhcp, dns, etc) between the two.
When I looked at the traffic it sends data every 3-4 seconds unencrypted.
I ran two tests today. I disconnected the generator from the router for 5 minutes then for 15 minutes. Both reconnected as soon as I reconnected the wire to the router. Looks like you are correct that it is a modem issue to the internet that is causing the issue. Last week Comcast was down for 5 minutes and I needed to reset the PCB on the generator to get the connection back.
When I logged into the oncue app there is a message saying that “Kohler is investigating issue with devices connection”. We will see. I sent info to tech support. Maybe this is helping?
Thanks for the note. The more specific info we can provide them will help. We now know that “rebooting the comcast router” causes it to fail. Is it an accurate statement then when it fails the indicator lights for that cable are out on the modem?
If so, it could be a problem with auto negotiation or auto-mdi-x. These both happen when the cable gets plugged in (or the router restarts), and based on the “lights being out”, it seems like that fundamental negotiation fails. There are two types of Ethernet cables: straight-through and cross-over, I have a straight-through (wired it myself). While the negotiations should work, I wonder if you have a cross over cable? Sometimes there are port specific settings the control this. There must be some comcast nuance in the negotiation that fouls up kohler. When the connection is working is it 10mbps, 100mbps or 1gbps? Mine is at 1gbps.
A final test would be to pull the internet cable out of the modem. This would tell us if it’s a problem with the modem losing internet or the modem rebooting.
To work around, putting a network switch in-between the Gen and the router would remove the negotiation issues. I use Cisco switches as I want them to work.