I’ve got a matter+thread dense home – 30 VTM31-SN (1.1.5) smart dimmer switches, 6 VTM30-SN (1.0.5) switches. Home Assistant Yellow with thread radio; 3 wired AppleTVs with thread radios.
About once a week, a switch or two goes out to lunch across both models. The LED stays lit, but the device drops off of thread/matter, and the physical switch doesn’t do anything either – totally non responsive. A quick pull of the air gap tab and they come back to life and work happily.
Anyone experiencing this and any ideas of how to troubleshoot?
Sounds like your setup is quite a bit like mine. I’m all the White series On/Off switches, but a HomeAssistant ZBT-2 and Apple HomePods.
For me I do have switches randomly just not work when I press up or down. Then of course I’ll hit them a bunch (up, down, up, down) and nothing happens.
I’ll open the HomeAssistant we browser or iOS app and navigate to Settings, Matter, pick the switch. It usually thinks it’s responsive (ie not showing Unavailable) but the history doesn’t have the recent up/down commands. Only thing I’ve found to help out is to ping the switch from there once or twice. It’ll respond to the ping and then eventually all my Up/Down taps come through and process. That is lights turn off then on then off as it works through the queue.
It’s a crappy solution admittedly but it’s all I’ve found that seems to work. Admittedly maybe just waiting longer it might solve itself. But I can’t stand when the light refuses to turn on!
When you say “does not work”, does the LED indicator on the switch turn on or off when you toggle the switch and just it’s the automations that do not run or both the physical switch and the automations do not work?
Almost all of my switches are in Smart Bulb mode so the LED indicators don’t go on and off anyways.
My setup is that I rely on Home Assistant to get the “press up”, “press down” events to trigger actions. Node Red is actually handling the action that’s taken. But in the HA device page where it shows recent activity, those events don’t show. That is it’ll say “Button Up last pressed 20 hours ago” maybe. So HA isn’t getting the event. So that’s what boiled down to “switch doesn’t work”. Lots of complexity to be sure but since HA doesn’t see the events (until they all come barreling through the queue), that’s what I meant.
I assume the physical switch would be fine if it wasn’t in Smart Bulb mode
Unless you have specifically disabled the LED bar it works the same whether Smart Bulb mode is on or off. The only difference is the load does not switch if you are in smart bulb mode. Here is a video of one of my VTM30s in smart bulb mode. I disabled all of the automations associated with it for this test (so no lights actually changed state).
The reason for the question is that I’m trying to figure out whether you have the same problem as @zachfriedland (which looks like a software crash) or a loss of Matter connectivity.
Gotcha. I must have disabled that since the LEDs don’t go on and off when I hit the up/down switch. Thinking back, was it the setting for “Control of Switch Load” (which I set to “Remote Control Only”) that does that disable? Whereas the few switches that aren’t smart bulbs, I have that set to “Remote & Paddle Control”.
FWIW, I use those LEDs to display a yellow or red based on a door and garage door being unlocked/open. And if the ceiling light is on in a room, I didn’t exactly need the LED bar too, lol. But yeah I forgot that was a setting I did. Hope that helps some deducing.
Overall I don’t think my issue is a software crash. I think it’s the event message (“Button Up”) gets queued up but doesn’t make its way to Home Assistant to take action on. Then once the connection gets working again, the queue flushes and all the backlogged stuff comes rushing through event message queues.
Oh wow I have the --exact-- same issue. I have been struggling with it for the last year with no relief.
I have 24 VTM31-SN smart dimmers that are on Alexa as the primary fabric and Home Assistant also controlling them, though this happens when I do not have Home Assistant involved, so based on your report, this does not seem to be a problem that originates from which border router manufacturer is in use.