New ESP devices dropping off after first install

ESPHome
1

I’ve already fixed my problem, but I’m not sure WHY it happened. I’m interested to see if anyone else has encountered the same issues.

I just added two new ESP32 devices (esp32thingplus) to ESPHome Builder but it seemed a lot more difficult than the last time. I have several around my farm.

My procedure is as follows:

  1. use Microsoft Edge and ESPHome.web to initialize the devices via usb/serial.
  2. add the WiFi details, then unplug the device from a data/power cable and plug it into power only. close Edge.
  3. Open the ESP Home Builder in Firefox
  4. ‘take control’ of the discovered ESP device in Home Builder. Follow the prompts/wizard.
  5. The device becomes available in ESPHome, but remains in a default state.

What happened this morning was, the devices would go ‘offline’ after the ‘take control’ process, yet they remained on the wifi network. It was not the mDNS issue, i did change ESPHome to use ping. I was forced to re-provision the devices. this time I interrupted the ‘take control’ process and checked the default yaml config, I could see it was missing an API string and generally looked quite strange / bare. I ended up manually authoring full config files using other configs as a template and generating an API string manually. Uploaded that and they are good. I just don’t remember having to fully configure them initially. I didn’t with some ESP32S3’s i added last month.

2

I haven’t used esphome.web recently, but it makes sense to me to keep the autogenerated YAML as bare as possible. So they don’t have to put their hands on it every time there’s some breaking change on components like API.