up and running. needed a full reinstall and HA restarts. no clue to why i stopped sending data. nothing interesting in logs etc. draws blank.
Bah, thatâs irritating! Letâs hope that never happens again thenâŚ
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Mine has also gone unavailable. Retarding HA usually fixes it.
Are you running an EQ or a Halo?
Running halo.
Gone unavailable again. Here are some logs.
2024-02-13 21:48:20.627 WARNING (MainThread) [custom_components.astralpool_halo_chlorinator.coordinator] Failed _gatherdata: 197 No backend with an available connection slot that can reach address 08:F9:E0:9E:C9:9E was found
2024-02-13 21:48:20.627 ERROR (MainThread) [custom_components.astralpool_halo_chlorinator.coordinator] Failed _gatherdata, giving up: 19
I ran the Chlorgo app, and that fixed it⌠HA good again. Weird?
Any thoughts @pbutterworth? Happy to help you with logs etc.
Yeah, it seems everyone with Halo is having this problem. At this stage it looks like a firmware bug in Halo where the Bluetooth gets hung up. Connecting via internet with the app clears the problem.
Might be more reliable with the Bluetooth adapter as close as possible to the halo, but this isnât 100% for sure.
Hoping to get Fluidra to look in to it. @nagyOUT is leading the charge on this.
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Yeh. Seems v2 firmware these issues have popped up. restarting HA or ESP32 doesnt resolve it. Only connecting via Halo Go App. Specifically you might have noticed only the Green (internet/cloud) Dot appeared when you connected to the Halo, and immediately after disconnecting from the halo back to the welcome screen, youâll see BOTH the Blue Dot (Bluetooth), and Green Dot (Internet/Cloud), appear.
So the issue is also seen on the Halo Go App (no bluetooth blue dot). But as you have noticed, connecting / disconnecting via the halo go app appears to rekickstart the Haloâs bluetooth.
Obviously, Astral wonât provide any support on the âMy HA Intergration stops workingâ scenario.
Fortunately, it has been notice to happen with the mobile app as well (without HA Integration). (repeated connections/disconnections effectively)
So I feel there wonât be much movement on a fix unfortunately.
of interest, what distance is your bleproxy from your halo? I appear to have better (less issues) if my ble proxy is 5meters away from the halo.
So part of my experimenting, I enabled RSSI tracking of the Halo BLE from esphome. And I was astonished at what I found. Obviously we know the onboard ESP32 antenna is not great, however I didnât realise just how bad it was.
My ESP32 was approx 4-5meters away line of sight of my halo and it was seeing -80dbm RSSI, which is absolutely terrible. I moved it into a waterproof enclosure directly underneath my halo, and it immediately jumped to -35dbm RSSI.
Blue - ESP32, initially 5 meters away, then underneath!
Purple - GL-S10, approx 15 meters away (PoE powered ESP32 with external antenna running esphome)
So - anything more than 1 meter away with a internal pcb antenna is not relevant even if we believe the Halo has a bluetooth hangup bug.
Iâm hoping this plays a huge part in the bluetooth connectivity hang up issue that we are experiencing with the Halo, particularly with firmware v2.
If youre interested in enabling rssi tracking in your bleproxy as well, you need to install the ESPHOME Add-in if you havent already got it, adopt your BLE Proxy (if you built it via the esphome web flasher).
Once you have adopted it - enable logging (wirelessly option), and wait for the connection to capture the MAC ADDRESS of your Halo.
(Youâll see it connecting every 60 seconds or so, green text â0x00 Attempting BLE connectionâ).
Once you have got the mac address, add these lines to the Yaml file, obviously replacing the mac address with yours.
esp32_ble_tracker:
sensor:
# RSSI based on MAC address
- platform: ble_rssi
mac_address: xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
name: "BLE Astral Halo RSSI"
You will get a compile link issue, so select the âClean Build Filesâ before trying to run Install again.
If youâve got multiple ble proxyâs (like I do), then adjust the name above so it contains some sort of unique name identifying which proxy is reporting the rssi
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My ESP is about 60cm from the Halo.
And yes, i notice when this happens, and i run the ChlorGo app, no blue dot - only green. So yes, spot on - bluetooth seems to âdieâ. Would be good to escalate to them somehow?
Yeah - not sure about the escalation on this, but the issue certainly appears to have been introduced by firmware v2.
You have to remember, weâre using their product in a way that it wasnât designed and thus, isnât officially supported by them.
The issue can happen from the mobile app, but as you can see, you can still âconnectâ to the halo, even though it is remote/cloud instead of Bluetooth.
The issue is for those that their halo is not Wifi / cloud connected, if their Bluetooth dies, you need to power cycle the unit. But the issue only appears to occur intermittently upon disconnection (The halo doesnt start to Advertise itself again).
There also appears to be no reproduceable trigger. Iâve had a full day of no problems, yet another day plagued with multiple times I had to open / connect via cloud for it to kick start Bluetooth again.
In Short - HA Integration issues are not their problem. Halo Go Mobile app Connectivity problems are. So until someone can reproduce the issue using the Halo Go App, we may not see any immediate movement.
In saying that - They are aware of this HA Integration, and they are also aware of this connectivity issue that begun with firmware v2. Watch this space I guess.
Ultimately we do want them to be receptive to issues such as this, however, we also donât want to burden them as we are using their product in a way it was not designed.
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Agreed. Has happened to me again just now. Rather than start the app, iâm going to leave it for a few hours and see if it fixes itself.
The unit resets at midnight based on the âuptimeâ in the stats⌠I wonder if it will resolve itself at midnight.
Further, mine also went offline, with the RSSI tracking enabled on my bluetooth proxyâs, its evident that even tracking it by Mac address, the haloâs bluetooth had stopped working.
I donât have solar to validate values 100%, please provide feedback.
Solar mode control coming soon, need to update pychlorinator library prior.
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Ok, Iâve enabled the Solar control with this update.
And more importantly, Iâve done some fine tuning as to how the Bluetooth connection is handled.
Previously the HA Integration was gracefully disconnecting from the Halo. Whilst this shouldnât be a problem, it appears that the Haloâs Bluetooth process was intermittently getting hung up.
The fix was to use the Halo Go App(note there was only a green dot), and connect via the cloud (green dot) and disconnect immediately.
This appeared to kickstart the Bluetooth process again on the Halo, which is evident as both the blue dot, and green dot were now visible again on the Halo Go App Home screen.
Now the HA Integration is waiting for the Halo to disconnect first (due to no anti timeout messages being sent)
The last 24 hours has been good for me. Iâm interested to hear your feed back @zappoo (and others experiencing issues since V2 firmware upgrade).
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Installed. Will keep an eye on it. Thankyou!
Ok. Mine went unavailable at 2:49am. So it was solid for at least 48 hours. So a lot more stable than it was. But it still highlights there is a bug in the halo firmware that was introduced with v2 firmware.
Mine has been OK, but early days. Is it not possible to detect this situation and somehow trigger a WIFI connection to the unit (ie emulate the app âfixâ)?
Yeah. Mine hung up again. Thatâs twice today. So I donât actually think it had improved anything.
Connecting to cloud you need to sniff the randomly generated password to connect. Not an easy task. But either way, I donât want to be like other intergration loading up companies cloud servers for them to try pissed off. Ie. myq and haier.
But Thereâs enough evidence here to Show that v2 firmware has issues with Bluetooth hanging up irrelevant of how we disconnect that we never experienced with v1.3.
Further Iâve reduced the poll time to 5 minutes, still hangs up, and also increased poll time to 20 seconds⌠still hangs up.