I have been using an NSPanel in my 2nd home for 8 months now. Even though I do not use HomeAssistant I programmed it using ESPHome since that was easier than dealing with non-working libraries for ESP32.
Anyway, I decided I wanted some changes to the interface, but in stead of taking my working NSPanel off and re-program it, I decided to buy a second NSPanel and work on that one, so I could work on it in my ‘1st’ home and continue using the old one in my 2nd.
But I find that as long as the new NSPanel is connected to power it works just fine. I can edit the yaml, upload new code to it and also uploading a new interface works like a charm (both ota). But as soon as I disconnect the power it will not boot anymore. Blank screen, and no connection to the network. So it is either in a boot-loop or does nothing at all, no way to tell without a serial connection. The only way to get it working again is to take the thing apart and upload the code through serial. When I click the front back on the base everything works as expected. Strange since of course it has been without power during that process. Maybe important to mention that the base keeps being connected to the mains during this process.
I also found that pressing the reset button on the bottom has the same result as disconnecting the power (mains).
The code I used is the same as in my other NSPanel, changes are Interface only. I can post my code if needed, but as the other one works flawlessly and continues to work after power outages (frequent thing at my 2nd home), I suspect the NSPanel itself.
Does anybody recognize this behavior?
Did I solve this? Who knows. At least for now it starts up again after a power-cycle.
Since I only changed the tft file there were two options: something wrong in the tft or something wrong with the NSPanel. So I started from scratch. First I uploaded NSPanel_blank.tft. I did this before, right after putting esphome on the NSPanel. With the blank tft I could power-cycle the device without problems, so that gave me hope the device itself was not broken.
I then uploaded my new tft file, to find it was back in its non working state. So, back to the Nextion editor where I started a new project and built the whole thing new. Lucky for me there are only two pages. After building this tft I uploaded it to the NSPanel (after first uploading blank.tft just to be sure) and everything still works. I also re-exported my old Nextion project, but with that installed it still won’t boot after a power-cycle or after pressing the reboot button. As far as I can see the two Nextion projects are identical, but somehow there must be a bug in the old one. So far so good, moving on…