Shellies dropping connection in asus aimesh network

[jotaSV]

Hey guys,

Currently i have around 40/50 shellies in my house, the problem is that over the day some of them keep dropping connection and never reconnect.

My setup is : 1 asus ax82u (main node) , 3 asus ax55u and 1 asus ax56u.



The shellies that drop connection are inside the red square and the green squares is where the routers are.



I have coloT in all of them, static ip , igmp enabled, disable Shelly ECO Mode, PMF (protected management frames) disabled, 20mhz in 2.4 fixed, fixed wifi channel, 2.4ghz separated from 5ghz, most recent firmware, tried already a lot of different possible solutions.
When the shellies drop connection the only thing that seems to fix it is restart the routers, also one strange thing that happens is that shellies show unavailable in homeassistant, I cant control their state, but i get the state updates, also they keep showing on my routers list, but when i try to connect to shelly webgui or ping them , then wont answer.



(Asus logs print something like this)

any ideas? can provide more info if needed

 

[OzarkEdge]

4 APs in ~6000sf might be too much WiFi(?) Have you tried with just 2 APs?

OE

 

[jotaSV]

4 APs in ~6000sf might be too much WiFi(?) Have you tried with just 2 APs?

OE

The area where i have problems it's inside the red square, where basically I have 2 AP's. Used to have one but it was worse
Also I tried to force which node each device should connect

 

[OzarkEdge]

The area where i have problems it's inside the red square

That's the area surrounded by 4 APs. What are the WLAN signal dBm levels in the center of that area, using a WiFi analyzer app?

Binding clients to nodes doesn't remove interfering WiFi and may be a poor fix for too much Wifi.

OE

 

[L&LD]

What are shellies?

I agree; there is too much WiFi in the home with 'only' that kind of SqFt area.

 

[Crimliar]

What are shellies?

I agree; there is too much WiFi in the home with 'only' that kind of SqFt area.

Easy Smart Home Automation

shelly.cloud

They are physically smart (some are even locally programmable) switches that live inline, often in back-boxes or even inside light fittings or wall cavities. While I have a few, they can run warm, don't like metal back boxes, can be unreliable, don't have the best WiFi reception - but thanks to their flexibility are still often the best solution available for some home automation purposes!

Great fun, but sometimes infuriating little devices!

 

[jotaSV]

That's the area surrounded by 4 APs. What are the WLAN signal dBm levels in the center of that area, using a WiFi analyzer app?

Binding clients to nodes doesn't remove interfering WiFi and may be a poor fix for too much Wifi.

OE

Will try and post here the results.
Shelly use multicast and ColoT and I saw on google that asus doesn't handdle that kind of traffic very well, could be because of this?

 

[kildare]

I have a similar situation in my house with more than 50 shellies and many other wifi IoT devices (Tuya, Sonoff, Emylo, etc.), all based on ESP8266.
And I too have an Asus Wifi mesh (5 XT8s).
All shellies have a fixed IP and use CoIoT unicast with Home Assistant.
I don't use the shelly app.

Only shellies sometimes become unavailable in HA and don't even respond to direct pings, they are totally unreachable on the network.
Only a power off/on restores the communication.
Instead all the devices from the other manuacturers have never missed a beat in many months!

I too sometimes see that some shelly's state is reported in HA even if that shelly is unreachable on the network.
This suggest to me that in some way the shelly IP stack is frozen but unicast messages are still sent out.

My opinion is that unfortunately the wifi stack programming in the shelly firmware isn't (yet) on par of the other ESP8266 devices.

 

[jotaSV]

I have a similar situation in my house with more than 50 shellies and many other wifi IoT devices (Tuya, Sonoff, Emylo, etc.), all based on ESP8266.
And I too have an Asus Wifi mesh (5 XT8s).
All shellies have a fixed IP and use CoIoT unicast with Home Assistant.
I don't use the shelly app.

Only shellies sometimes become unavailable in HA and don't even respond to direct pings, they are totally unreachable on the network.
Only a power off/on restores the communication.
Instead all the devices from the other manuacturers have never missed a beat in many months!

I too sometimes see that some shelly's state is reported in HA even if that shelly is unreachable on the network.
This suggest to me that in some way the shelly IP stack is frozen but unicast messages are still sent out.

My opinion is that unfortunately the wifi stack programming in the shelly firmware isn't (yet) on par of the other ESP8266 devices.

Exactly my problem, Im currently watching one shelly that is completely unreachable in the network (no ping , no web gui) but it's still sending mdns messages

 

[jotaSV]

I have a similar situation in my house with more than 50 shellies and many other wifi IoT devices (Tuya, Sonoff, Emylo, etc.), all based on ESP8266.
And I too have an Asus Wifi mesh (5 XT8s).
All shellies have a fixed IP and use CoIoT unicast with Home Assistant.
I don't use the shelly app.

Only shellies sometimes become unavailable in HA and don't even respond to direct pings, they are totally unreachable on the network.
Only a power off/on restores the communication.
Instead all the devices from the other manuacturers have never missed a beat in many months!

I too sometimes see that some shelly's state is reported in HA even if that shelly is unreachable on the network.
This suggest to me that in some way the shelly IP stack is frozen but unicast messages are still sent out.

My opinion is that unfortunately the wifi stack programming in the shelly firmware isn't (yet) on par of the other ESP8266 devices.



View attachment 42979

Hi buddy,

Did u ever got a fix for this?

 

[kildare]

Months ago I resorted to adopt the following changes:

a) all my XT8s (in AP mode) are running 42095 firmware version
b) replaced 90% of my Gen1 Shellyes with the corresponding Gen2 models (except for Gen2 dimmers still not released). Gen2 devices are wifi rock solid, only the new communication protocol (RPC) they use with the native Home Assistant Shelly integration is a bit slower when tracking a device status change in comparison with the Gen1 CoIoT protocol.

Overall my smarthome system is now 90% working correctly.

 

[copekyle]

I was hoping that the fix wouldn't be updating the shelly devices! I'm experiencing this exact issue with my Shelly Gen1's. I just upgraded my router to an Asus ax58u due to my old netgear having problems. I've found that when the shelly devices get into this state, I can change the wireless channel on the Asus and the devices come back onto the network. I'm not sure why this works but I'm hoping there is a better fix than just replacing 30+ shelly's around my house at ~$20 each....

 

[nicknick]

My Shellys (roller control) have a roaming setting that was disabled by default. Being disabled, mine tried to connect always to the same AP, regardless of signal. If this is disabled and you also have roaming assistant on Asus, you could have problems.

Try to enable roaming on Shellys and look if it improves connection.

 

[pgershon]

I had issues with my Shellys recently after Optimum Online installed a new WiFi router for fiber (and its signal was interfering with the Shellys). I finally put in a new router ($20) connected to Asus network to communicate with the Shelleys. It's a lot cheaper than replacing g the Shelly devices. I suspect that the Shelly-ASUS connect was imperfect in some way. But zero issues since I added the new cheap router.