Hi friends,
I wanted to share an issue i resolved today with Sonoff RF Bridge & at the same time seek some advice from the community on what could be done about it long term.
The issue i found:
I started noticing that some of my rf sensor based automations were not firing & that lovelace was not reflecting the correct sensor state.
Troubleshooting:
During my investigations i confirmed via my mqtt broker & via the rf bridge (tasmota console) that half of the rf sensor codes (only the ON codes) for the sensors close by the bridge were being received while none of the codes were being received from sensors further away from the bridge.
Cause & Solution:
The issue started after i decided it was a genius idea to power my rf bridge by usb battery (while the battery is also charing from mains power). This was my first attempt to keep a crucial part of my DIY security solution from failing during a home power cut. I have several UPS devices keeping other parts of my system running in power outage event but i realised that my home alarm would not be triggered by opening doors or windows. The rf bridge was only mains powered.
So the issue immediately went away as soon as i removed the USB battery from the equation. It would seem that the power out of the USB battery was not adequate to power the rf brdige well enough. For reference this is the wiki for the Sonoff rf bridge.
So the question to the community is…should it be possible to power the rf bridge from a battery & if so what kind of power output might i need? This is an electronics issue clearly over my head.
Cheers
Nick