WLEDs repeatedely going Offline

Issues
1

Reposting this at divsys’ request from an old thread]. This does seem similar to other issues over the years, like this one.

After using the same WLED devices for three years without issue, they have started appearing “Offline” in the iPhone app. Two of my devices are reflashed, cheap sp511e devices. They’re running WLED v0.14.0-b5. About four weeks ago, they started appearing “Offlline” in the iphone app. About four days ago, the other two (esp8266 deices running WLED v0.14.0) started behaving the same way.

Power cycling the device makes it responsive again. The time the devices remain responsive varies, but can be as short as several minutes.

My router is a Unifi Dream Machine. I haven’t made any changes to the configuration in the weeks leading up to the issue, but it does have auto upgrade enabled. I have the devices connected to a separate WiFi AP that’s 2.4 GHz-only. After this issue started, I checked the “Enhanced IoT Connectivity” option. That has not helped.

I have checked the “Disable WiFi sleep” option in the WLED WiFi configs.

A few interesting things:

  • They still respond to the IR remote, so they’re not completely dead.
  • Mr router has a “Test Latency” function. The test works even when “Offline”. It fails when I unplug the devices. So again, they’re not completely dead.
  • When a device is “Offline”, browsing to it in times out; the web page isn’t available.
  • I run Homebridge with the “Homebridge Wled Ws” plugin. Sometimes when they are “Offline”, I can still control them through that. I think this has something to do with this comment that the plugin author has on the site. It’s using websockets instead of MQTT or HTTP. I think that the HA plugin may also use web sockets?
  • When the device is “offline” and I use an IR remote to turn the lights off and on, the device stops being offline in the wled iPhone app.

I have turned off my Homebridge server to see if that helps. I’m not using HomeAssistant, although I am considering trying it out. Yesterday, I upgraded the esp8266 devices to v0.14.4.

2

Thanks for restarting the thread :+1:

As far as the connectivity stuff, I definitely recall seeing ws being overdriven by HA.
It wouldn’t shock me if the Homebridge plugin does something similar.

Further, I see a note in the KB under the Websockets section:

On ESP8266, it is recommended to have no more than 2 clients connected simultaneously.

Where a client is a websocket connection.
As I recall, those plugins/apps might not close a connection properly before starting a new one.

You could try and take your WLED devices “offline” and use the internal AP to control them for a temporary check.

Don’t know if V0.15 has better outcomes for this kind of “ws-overdrive”???