Hi. I have a Zigbee Philips Hue Outdoor motion. It’s battery operated. It works well for days/weeks but then goes offline and stays offline. It has very good signal with a routing device within feet from it. When it goes offline I can even take it down and set it on top of a routing device and it will never come back “online”. The only way to get it back “online” is if I reprogram it from scratch, however I’ve done this many times and it’s getting old. I’ve even bought a new unit and it does the exact same thing.
-Firmwares are all up to date.
-Full battery.
-Great signal within feet of routing device(s).
-Tried another new unit and same issue.
Process of elimination, unless there is some setting in HA that I’ve set wrong, then it must be a bug.
I use Zigbee2Mqtt and Mosquitto Broker. Could I have something set up wrong? One thing I noticed that seems weird is that if I map the devices in 2MQTT then the route some devices take is crazy. Some are not picking up routers that are literally night next to them but a device across the house will be connected to it. Is that something I can manually adjust? Are there any other settings I should check?
That’s because passive PIR/Doppler sensors are not ideal for outdoor spaces which can have lot of volatility like moving cars/pedestrians/trees/pets, flickering lights or any other motion that keeps triggering the sensor or lack of it.
I’ve been there and been through that, what I found most effective outdoors was to install few cheap cameras (like V380) that support RSTP feed and configure it for motion detection (for cars or known objects) and eliminate false positives which worked lot better (for me) than passive motion sensors .
This install is in the middle of 40 acres of land. Very little RF. Again, the link quality is strong. And even taking the motion sensor down and placing it right next to a routing device, it still stays “offline”.
The motion just decides to go offline for no reason and there’s no bringing it back except to reprogram it. But it goes back “offline” within a couple days.
Note it has full battery and, even when offline, the led indicator on the device triggers when it detects motion. So the device itself is functioning.
It seems to be a SERIOUS bug with HA. Unless there’s some setting in HA that I set wrong.
I also posted about HA dropping battery-driven appliances, in my case a thermostat. Does the sensor remain connected for a longer time when you change the option ‘consider battery powered devices unavailable after’ to a larger value?
See: ZHA makes devices unavailable after 6 hours
Hue motion detectors have been 100% for me, but I have noticed enough sporadic forum posts about them going offline to be suspicious there could be an issue.
When yours go “offline” do they ever come back online? To me that’s the strangest thing. No matter what, even with it literally sitting on top of a routing device or even the main, it will never come back online unless it’s deleted and rejoined.
I’m using ZHA and had this happen after HA restarts (usually because of an upgrade).
The last time this happened, of my 25 or so devices, three needed to be power cycled to become responsive again, even tho they allegedly showed as online.
Not sure if the query was directed at me or another.
Mine have not gone offline at all. but I have noticed sporadc report posts in various forums. I tend to notice the posts that relate to products I’m using.
Hi @jerrm . I am trying to enable logging as you suggested. I have only changed things through the normal GUI. Never messed with configuration.yml etc. Little hesitant. Not even sure where that’s located to do that. Is it difficult to do? My skill level is I’m a very computer literate user but not a code writer.
Since my post about 28 days ago, I’ve switched my zigbee stick to the Skyconnect and the device has behaved perfectly ever since, I’m pretty sure It would have failed before now.
