White Series "No response" after relocating Apple TV

[jascks]

Hello,

My HomeKit smart home consisted largely of a number of Eve Energy smart plugs, motion sensors, and door/window sensors along with a wifi Meross garage door opener and smart outlet out on the deck.

I’ve been wanting to install some smart switches for quite some time, and I was happy to see Eve recently introduce a dimmer version of its switch. But while researching that, I kept finding positive things about Inovelli smart switches, and the White Series sounded perfect for my needs.

Anyway, I’ve installed about 15 of them so far in both the default on/off and dimmer modes, single pole and 3-way using the aux switch. It looks like they are all running firmware 1.0.5, and things have been working quite well over the last couple of weeks since installing them.

Then yesterday, I temporarily relocated the Apple TV 4k one room over (it’s the only border router/hub in the home) and all of the Inovelli switches stuck at “No response” in the home app. The Eve components all came up just fine. Even the White Series switch in the same room as the Apple TV was “No Response”.

I tried the switch power cycle tab on the front of the switch, but that did not help. I moved the Apple TV back to its original location, but all switches remained stuck at “No response”. Once again, Eve stuff was good to go. Note in both locations, the Apple TV received the same IP address via DHCP over ethernet (no wifi).

Following advice elsewhere in this community. I chose a switch and removed it from Homekit, did the factory reset on the switch, and then added it as a new accessory. That worked! I had to re-assign the button actions I had on the config switch, and that switch was back in business.

Last week, after most of the switches had been installed and configured, I updated the Apple TV to 18.4. That required a period of time that device was offline while installing the new software and restarting etc. Everything was happy after the update. Likewise, I’ve flipped breakers on and off that impacted already installed switches, and everything recovered fine.

So, I was a little surprised that just powering off the Apple TV for some minutes resulted in this disaster. I have since restored a number of other switches, though there are scenes and automations to redo. This is rather a pain in the butt if things are this fragile. The Apple TV is on a UPS, but nothing lasts forever during a long power failure. I’d hate to have to do this again.

Is there any way to avoid this scenario repeating itself? Has anyone else had to deal with this? Maybe it’s a Matter thing? I’ve not yet updated my Eve components to Matter.

Thanks!

Jeff

[bigDvette]

Are the eve devices thread? Do they use matter thread? It likely would have recovered at some point when the ip addresses leases started to timeout.

Moving the border router is the destructive act. Once they give up their hey struggle to come back and you likely needed to turn off the breakers to all the rooms with switches to force it to rebuild the whole network otherwise it may have just tried to connect to the switch BR it was on previously/

[jascks]

Hi @bigDvette, thank you for your response!

The Eve devices are Thread based, though I’ve not yet upgraded them to support Matter. I’ve read some horror stories about that, and I’ve so far not made that step. So I guess that makes them HomeKit over Thread?

My understanding is that in a Thread network, most devices wired into the home, as well as the Eve Energy smart plugs and the water guards, serve as Thread routers to extend the mesh network. I was thinking the border router move would tap into this, and the devices in the network, while not able to access the border router for a short period of time, would just carry on upon its return.

The border router move was mid-day yesterday, and I waited until this morning to start repairing the damage. All of the White Series switches were still indicated with “No response” after 18 hours or so. However, I did not cycle the breakers to the switches. I did not see that as being different from using the ‘air gap’ tab on the front which did not resolve my issue.

I did end up resetting each one and built things back up, so they are all reporting in again. I’ll try the breaker reset approach next time this happens.

I know Matter itself is a work in progress, along with Apple’s support of it. And, perhaps the Eve devices would have behaved just as badly if I had upgraded them to Matter earlier. This is all fairly new to me.

Cheers,

Jeff

[bigDvette]

I don’t think the thread over HomeKit and thread over matter devices interoperate over the same mesh as unless they are speaking the same language (matter or HomeKit) not sure how they would pass on the message. I’ve read some articles that explicitly state that but it isn’t highly verifiable.

So if we assume they aren’t supporting one another, you’d be left with the inovelli devices in that mesh.

I mention the breaker as a way to pull the power on all devices at once by all the associated breakers, you could also pull all the reset tabs and then enable again, but my experience has been of the nodes that think they are the hop to the TBR the. Some other switch might just jump back to that device where if you reset a device then by going through the pairing process it establishes a new route.

It would be som much easier if you could visualize the mesh, but you can’t.

I’m using home assistant and apple home using multiple Apple TVs . I can look at the matter server and see what devices are offline. It happens from time to time after an update and the devices seem lost but if pull the tab they go back on but all my devices are in range of an Apple TBR all the time. I have yet to have to reset a switch.

[jascks]

I’ve used the Eve app to examine, well sort of, the Thread network, seeing routers and endpoints etc. There is a lot of text, but it does not draw out the topology of the network unfortunately. Boy would that be nice.

Anyway, I could have sworn that before I pulled the plug on the Apple TV that the White Series switches did not appear in the Thread network as known to Eve. They are there now though, along with the Eve components. So perhaps all of this resetting resulting in a single Thread network, or, I could be just mis-remembering.

Well, lots to learn I guess. Thanks again for the information.

Jeff

[jascks]

To resolve the problem previously, I had to remove every switch from Home, factory reset it and then add each back into Home. As I did this, I made sure each Matter code was also stored in ControllerForHomeKit on my Mac so next time I would not have to remove all of the switch plates etc.

It recently happened again. We had a storm and some lightning activity in the area, and after a brief power outage, all of the White switches turned “No Response”, and have remained there for a few days now. And, again, the Eve gear recovered just fine.

Today I turned off most breakers in the house (left on a couple of large appliances) for about a minute and then turned them all back on. The Apple TV is on a UPS along with the TV, and during this time I restarted it.

After restoring power, within Home, everything was “Updating” for a bit, but all of the switches are “No Response” as before. According to Home, the switches are running firmware 1.0.5.

Given almost six months have passed since I started this thread, are there any other ideas out there? Before I reset and reprogram (dimmer mode and speed, LED on/off colors) for 20 or so switches and redo a number of config button and LED scene automations in Home, it seems like a good idea to ask. Not to mention it seems unlikely this will be the last time this happens.

Thanks,

Jeff

[jascks]

In a bit of a desperate move, I upgraded the Apple TV to 26.0. I read it has Thread 1.4 support as well as other Apple Home improvements. If nothing else, if I still had to factory reset and re-add the switches, at least that would not be put at risk again with a later move to 26. Maybe flawed logic…

After the update, most switches were indicated as “Unavailable”, but some were not, though they were still not operable via the Home app. After looking at some Apple discussion postings, I then pulled the power cord out of the Apple TV waited 30 seconds, and plugged it back in.

Well, everything came back fine: all of the White switches, along with the already working Eve Thread based components, Meross wifi (outdoor power strip, garage door), as well as the automations around them and the switch LED strip scenes etc. I am so relieved I do not have to setup a good chunk of that again from scratch!

When I earlier flipped the breakers, I only restarted the Apple TV (on a UPS). Perhaps power cycling it at that time as well would have resolved it all at that time, even back on tvOS 18.x. Anyway, next time I’ll just power cycle the Apple TV. If that does not do it, then do the circuit breaker thing again, including the Apple TV.

Cheers, Jeff