Reconnect node to HA after IP change, WITHOUT dashboard? Or: HA/esphome network whitepaper?

Hey everyone,
I’ve got 2 esp32s running esphome, both initially integrated nicely and automatically into my HA instance after I flashed them via USB from my laptop. I don’t use the esphome dashboard within HA at all, as my underlying Raspberry doesn’t have enough memory to compile and flash the ESPs without crashing. My dashboard is therefore empty, my devices never showed up there after I switched to the laptop/commandline approach.

The problem: I had to reboot one of the ESPs, so my router gave it another IP address via dhcp in the process, but HA still seems to look for the old IP address:

Can't connect to ESPHome API for 192.168.1.17 @ 192.168.1.17: Error connecting to ('192.168.1.17', 6053): [Errno 113] Connect call failed ('192.168.1.17', 6053)

(edit: my network setup here is super straightforward. Everything running under 192.168.1., no VLANs, the router of my internet provider does the dhcp, wifi connections are provided by a “dumb” wifi accesspoint which is cable-connected to the router)

How can I nudge HA to look for the new IP address instead, WITHOUT using the esphome dashboard? Change a config file? Just flash the ESP again with the same code? …? Pressing “Reload” in the integrations dashboard for the node in question didn’t help, actually the error message above was probably triggered by that.

I’m planning to set static IP addresses for my ESPs from now on, but even then I might run in situations where HA needs to switch to a new one at least once.

Alternatively/Also: which documentation would you recommend that describes the networking approach/architecture between HA and esphome comprehensively? I’d like to learn more overall how the interplay works there, and so far I’m googling my ass off to find bits and pieces (mDNS, HA calls esp and not the other way around, …) in the official documentation, threads in this forum, or github bug reports. So if you have a good source, please let me know :slight_smile:

Thanks a lot in advance, cheers!

in terms of docs i dont know of other resources.

In case someone stumbles upon this thread: I added the node manually via “add integration” => “esphome” => new ip address as host. In the first try I added it without deleting the old, which resulted in 2 devices with the same name, both unavailable. I then deleted both and added it in once again, now it works again, also in old automations.

So you used the ui.

The integrations area of the UI, yes. Not the esphome dashboard.