Blinds opening and closing intermittently

#1

Anyone else experiencing this issue? Blinds controller has been working fine up until about 2 weeks ago. Have not updated the firmware since the original installation nor have I made an significant changes to the MQTT or other controllers.

But suddenly the blinds will close and immediately reopen at random times throughout the day. Note that this does not happen every day and it never happens when the blinds are closed. Only when the blinds are in a open state.

I have swapped out the power brick, the power cable and have double-checked my MQTT and other home controller settings. All seem to be working fine. next up is re-flashing the firmware just for the sake of it and resetting all MQTT topics to new ones. Again, just to eliminate possible failure points.

SETUP:
Blinds firmware - v2 as shipped.
Home Assistant - latest version
Node-Red for automations

If anyone has experienced please let me know and if you resolved i would appreciate any direction.

#2

I experienced this same thing about a month ago, turned out my crappy Verizon router was dropping out causing the problem. I replaced my router with a ASUS modem and wireless access points and it solved the problem. Also increased my download/upload speeds.

#3

I’ll see if replacing my Xfinity modem does anything. i have noticed that my internet connectivity has been super spotty lately.

Since all my smart home devices live INSIDE the network and I don’t use anything that needs cloud connectivity, i would not have thought about this being a cause. But the modem is the oldest piece of hardware in the house. I do have a newer Netgear Nighthawk wireless AP and a pretty solid server environment for the controllers. So your suggestion gets bumped to the top and we will see what happens. Thanks for the comment back.

#4

Every time my wireless dropped out and the blind controllers reconnected MQTT would tell them to operate to the last set level since I set “retain” as true, so they would cycle off then on to my set level.

#5

As a follow-up to my original post. Problem is solved. For me, it was the RPi being pushed to its very limits. Seems that the load was so high that various services would fail to respond, notably the MQTT broker. Once I realized this, I swapped out the hardware for a more robust NUC that I grabbed from Newegg and I have not had an issue since. I still make bad decisions when tinkering that run the load off the charts and see this very behavior, but at least I know the cause and how to mitigate.

For those that are curious. I was using the RPi 2 B and had about 35 devices managed with Home Assistant. Most were MQTT but several were ZWave+ on the Aeotech stick. It was all the add-ons that I think killed my load more than just the 30 or so devices. When I rebooted the Pi it would take minutes to come back up. After the hardware upgrade the reboots would take 20-30 seconds. It’s all “Dockerized” now and occasionally that gets me in trouble with less well-behaved Docker containers, but at this point I would never go back to the Pi to run my home automation system. Again, no offense to those that use and love their Pi’s. I repurposed mine and it is now a completely capable garden IoT device on the network.