LocalDeck regular upgrade broke device

ESPHome
1

Hi everybody,

I received my LocalDeck in December and it worked fine. Provisioning via bluetooth, then connected to Home Assistant. Buttons worked, light entities worked.

I then used LocalDeck Configurator (official HASS addon) to configure the device. When I then flashed that new firmware, everything stopped working. The device was trying to connect to my wifi, but kept losing connection. That was all I could see via the logs back then.

Tried re-flashing by first flashing the ESPHome minimal firmware, adapting to Esphome addon, then pasting the contents of the localdeck yaml file from LocalBytes. That did not help, either.

Didn’t have time to look further into it until now. It was unplugged from late December until now as well. Now I have tried re-flashing again by first erasing firmware via esptool, then tried to install the ESPHome minimal firmware. But somehow, the device won’t even accept the firmware. I get the warning about perhaps having to hold the BOOT button before clicking install, but there is no boot button. I know that button_00 (the very bottom left button on the localdeck) is used when adapting the device to Home Assistant, so I tried that one, but it did not work.

So now the device won’t let me flash even the minimal ESPHome firmware, which means, it does not do anything at all.

Has anybody here experienced issues with that device and would please point me in the right direction? I have head two not fully functioning LocalDecks until I finally got this working one. And then the first firmware update breaks it? There must be a way to fix this…

Thank you in advance for your ideas :slight_smile:

2

Gonna answer to myself in case anybody else was/is in this situation.

Flashing via https://web.esphome.io/ was not possible; however, I was able to flash via esptool.py through the command line. After doing so, the LocalDeck would not be discovered by Home Assistant, nor ESPHome Builder, however, the device created an open wifi hotspot to which I was able to connect, provide wifi credentials to my local network, and then it was back in Home Assistant.

Since I used the default name etc. from the LocalDeck example configuration, it was back to its original state, so my previous automations worked just fine again.

I used these commands

  • esptool.py --port /dev/ttyACM0 erase_flash (delete firmware from device)
  • esptool.py -p /dev/ttyACM0 write_flash 0x0 localdeck.factory.bin (upload firmware I built with and manually downloaded from ESPHome Builder)