M5 lite with poe always showing away

ESPHome
1

Hi,

I have an M5 lite sitting on a poe adaptor: m5-docs.

It’s running ESPHome with the Bluetooth proxy and ble tracker components.

I have no WiFi component defined only the ethernet one.

In home assistant the device always shows as away, I think because the MAC address which the integration uses is the MAC of the WiFi not the Ethernet.

The device was originally on WiFi until I switched in the ethernet component.

I’ve tried removing deleting the device from HA and letting it be rediscovered but it just ended up with the wrong MAC again.

I’ve also tried editing various state files to change the MAC as mentioned in Replacing a device with an identical one doesn't work well in HA, that just stopped HA from starting so I undid my changes.

I can’t find anywhere in either HA or ESPHome components which allows setting the MAC to use as they unique id or for presence detection.

Does anyone know how I can get the device to report as home?

Thanks,
Ian

2

What’s your use case to track the location of a PoE device?

3

I was thinking of it as a synonym for online Vs offline I suppose rather than a location tracker as such.

I could hide it or delete I suppose, but the incorrect /unused MAC is still in the device info.

Ian

4

I just noticed that the entity has gone from “away” to “unavailable” which has made me realise that the entity comes from the uniffi component. I suppose the old DHCP lease for the wifis MAC address has now expired. That would indeed suggest I should just delete.

The MAC in the device info would still be wrong, but I suppose that is strictly speaking the id of the actual M5 lite not the lite+poe combined device.

Ian

5

I just happened to be looking at the ESP device logs and actually it does show the “WiFi” mac address (the one which HA reports) as the Ethernet address:

[11:45:26][C][ethernet:341]: Ethernet:
[...]
[11:45:26][C][ethernet:552]:   MAC Address: 4C:75:25:AD:AE:DC

But what my Uniffi controller (and DHCP server) are seeing 4c:75:25:ad:ae:df.

So this smells like it is perhaps an issue with the esphome Ethernet support not an HA thing.

I’m using Support W5500 SPI-Ethernet polling mode if framework is supported by slakichi · Pull Request #7503 · esphome/esphome · GitHub but that’s about interrupts and polling not something I’d expect to effect the MAC address. It does require a non-default framework, so I suppose it might be that.

Ian.