Odd behavior in mesh WiFi environment

ESPHome
,
1

I have odd behavior from my ESP32 devices (2023.6.5). I’m building small “controllers” to drop in all the rooms in my home; for now just DHT22 temp/humidity, with plans for later expansion depending on the room the controller is in. Each controller will be dedicated to a single room and will not move around.

In my home I use a pair of (cheap) TPLink Deco X60 mesh devices for WiFi (configured as plain AP’s). For the router I have a VM running IPFire, and additional VM’s for DHCP, DNS and AD authentication. My Home Assistant installation is also a VM. (XCP-NG is my hypervisor in case it matters.)

One mesh access point is on my desk. The other is on the other end of the house in the laundry room.

I can create ESPhome devices just fine, they work super reliably and it all functions 100% as designed…by my desk. The second I move a device away from my desk it goes offline, no matter how close I put it to the other mesh AP. I even went so far as to install another completely standalone AP with a completely different SSID and flash the devices with the new SSID. Same behavior: works great by my desk, but won’t connect to the standalone AP, even though it’s mere feet from it.

I saw that there is a history of issues with mesh devices and ESPHome, but some of that looks to be addressed via enable_btm and enable_rrm (which I have done, to no avail). It’s not clear to me if these mesh issues are still a problem or not.

Can someone ELI5 what might be going on here? This feels like I’m missing something obvious.

Thanks for any help you can offer!

2

I have a 5 node Deco mesh and as you are aware they aren’t known for their configurability. I have no issues with moving devices around.

The only real config change I have made is to turn fast roaming off. You could try that, but given all the other network stuff you have running maybe it’s a mDNS issue?

3

Do ESP32 devices require a 2.4GHz connection? I had some issues with my mesh which was mixing 2.4 and 5GHz - resolved it by having the router use a separate SSID for 2.4GHz.

4

This is your biggest mistake, why you buy this expensive x60 model, in simple word entire deco family is prototype, now forgot espressif module stablty, even some how you successfully able connect to deco, by time they keep going connect and disconnect. Try to replace x60 model with M4 model so your success rate become high.