ESPHome LB Plugs flicking like tiny power cut

mattface

Hi I’ve just received 3 of the LB UK plugs with ESPHome preinstalled. Got them onto my WiFi with ease and am driving them with pdudeamon (that’s a whole other topic).

But sadly all 3 of them are randomly doing a very quick off/on a few times an hour, which kept making me think I was having tiny power cuts. Except I’m not having a power cut, I know the plugs aren’t being commanded to switch, and nothing shows in the logs in the web UI. I can hear the relays clicking off and on for a fraction of a second.
Anyone else experienced this with new plugs?

SaaX

Never saw that with currently 19 UK plugs in daily use.

mattface

I’ve noticed that it happens a specific time after being powered up.
I put power to all 3 this morning within a few seconds of each other, and then some specific time later they all flicked the lamps on them in the order I powered them on.
It’s same as when I click reboot in the web ui, I’m wondering if they are crashing and restarting after a certain time.

mattface

11:25:24 [E] [api:127] No client connected to API. Rebooting... 11:25:24 [I] [app:127] Forcing a reboot...

Caught it in the logs. Any idea how I can turn this forced reboot off?

SaaX

Is it rebooting every 15 mins by any chance?

mattface

Yes every 15 minutes, and a quick search tells me it’s because the default reboot_timeout setting of 15m causes them to reboot every 15 minutes if no client connects to the API.
I don’t intend to ever connect these to homeassistant or suchlike, and I suppose there’s no way to change this setting without flashing new firmware 🙁

SaaX

I haven’t tried this but found the relevant ESPhome setting:
https://esphome.io/components/wifi#configuration-variables

reboot_timeout (Optional, Time): The amount of time to wait before rebooting when no WiFi connection exists. Can be disabled by setting this to 0s, but note that the low level IP stack currently seems to have issues with WiFi where a full reboot is required to get the interface back working. Defaults to 15min. Does not apply when in access point mode.

SaaX

So yeah, I guess the only way is to flash the new settings. Would re-flashing them be a lot of hassle?

mattface

Ideally a tasmota binary would probably be better for my use case, so I would be looking for an OTA file to use for that

BertQuodge

I have a plug in my bedroom that can reboot if my local AP updates its firmware overnight. The plug woke me once, so I set the reboot time to 12 hours on this device, with a “reboot_timeout: 720min” in my config.

Updating the firmware is simple, if you have the ESPHome installed.

ESPHome Install Guides

mattface

Just to close this up, I knocked up a skeleton ESPHome setup just enough to be able to set the API reboot_timeout to 0s on my 3 plugs and my problem is solved.
Thanks for the assistance!