Some White switches losing ability to connect to Home Assistant

Switches General Discussion
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Cross-posting from the Home Assistant community (link) since it’s unclear where the issue lies. Will summarize here:

  • ~30 Inovelli white dimmers installed throughout the house
  • 3 backhauled Eero Pro 6E’s as routers & thread border routers
  • Home Assistant on a RPi5 hardwired into one of the Eeros running HAOS
  • Everything updated to latest, including 1.0.5 switch firmware

Eventually with no discernible pattern some switches stop being able to connect with HA. This comment describes the issue with detailed logs from HA’s matter server: HA is sending a CASE Sigma3 but it doesn’t look like the device is accepting it, as it keeps re-sending a Sigma2. This pattern continues even through reboots, but resolves upon factory reset/re-pairing.

This makes me believe that something is wrong with how the encryption is being handled, but I’m unable to debug any further (I had hoped to manually impersonate the matter server via chip-tool, but I don’t think the tool is capable of it).

It’s worth sharing that I have added to the ACL of some of these switches as part of binding them together. Of note there:

  1. Not all of the problematic switches have had this change, it’s about 50/50 (so it’s unlikely to be cause of the problem).
  2. The binding still functions properly even when HA can’t connect.

Any advice on further debugging would be greatly appreciated.

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Brian, I had this issue last week with about 50 switches. As soon as I switched my 2.4ghz channel to a new band all of the interference cleared up for me and now things are working the way they had been working. Not sure about your specific situation but that worked for me. I should say everything has reconnected except for one switch that will not communicate.

I might ask you one question and see if you have an answer. I have that one switch that refuses to reconnect. Then I have one switch that was connected and I was having issues so I did a factory reset and now I can’t get it into pairing mode. Any clue on the best way to get a device into pairing mode that refuses? Also one device that works and is seen by the system but refuses to reconnect?

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I don’t think this is a communication/dropped packet issue, as it’s not intermittent, switch-to-switch communication always works, and the Sigma3 message is specifically the one that never gets processed. I believe the switch is receiving but rejecting the Sigma3 message for unclear reasons.

I had to RMA a switch that won’t pair on factory reset. For me it was likely a botched firmware update that got the switch in a weird state. I’m not aware of a way to fix switches that won’t pair other than to factory reset them.