Strange interaction: R2 to Home Assistant!

General
1

HI ALL,

I have both the R2 and the R3, but I’m still using my R2 for my daily use and holding the R3 in reserve just in case the R2 dies. Also, I’m still on the non-beta firmware for the R2 and I’m still skittish about using any beta updates until they are formally released for the R2.

Anyway, I have a Hubspace (Home Depot brand) ceiling fan that I interface into HA and set up several HA scripts assigned to buttons and I “press” those buttons within R2. It all has been working very well for quite some time. Unfortunately the fan controller died and I was able to get another under warrantee and basically replacing the controller went fine. Then I had to pair it into Hubspace and that also went fine. Next I had to re-pair it into HA and that got a little messy as I tried to use the same scripts and names for the “new” device. I got that straightened and then lastly I had to reconfigure R2 to “press” the correct buttons.

To make a long story short (I had to work on it all afternoon!) it seemed that there were two HA “button” entities in R2 with the same name and it was why some of the operations were not working. I figured I could delete both from R2 and then pull in the new one. Well after I deleted the two identical names on the R2, when I went from the active activity to another activity (all in the same group) R2 showed a red error at the top saying something like “No Data Found”. No matter which other activity I tried I got the same thing. At that point my R2 was useless!

Luckily I made an R2 backup a couple of months ago and did a restore and it was back to working, except of course with the Hubspace fan. As a test I deleted the two identical entities and got the same red error when switching activities and had to do a restore again.

I came up with a workaround. I left the two identical entities and in HA I defined a new script and button with a new name and pulled that into R2 and remapped the R2’s button to “push” the new HA button and THAT WORKED!

So bottom line I think I got it all straightened out but I have no idea why R2 got so upset when I deleted the two identical entities. I’m not crazy about leaving those entities in the R2 but if it’s working fine, I not going to touch it.

Gerry
2

The red error message will come up when there are activities that still contain entities that are unavailable or deleted.

Maybe you can delete the entities from the activities and add the new ones. Even if the new ones have the same name as the old ones, they probably have a different ID

3

@gerryex while I understand the reservations about beta, Release firmware is so far behind that you are living with bugs and missing out on lots of features. Current beta seems stable for both R2 and R3 (I have both) … would recommend taking the plunge.

4

Hi Quinterly,

If the beta versions for R2 are so stable, then why doesn’t UC formally release them. For certain types of software (or firmware) I have a pretty strict rule: If it’s working then leave it alone! Until today with the replacement of the fan controller, my R2 configuration has been working without problems for about a year or more.

As soon as UC formally releases new versions for R2 I will allow it to update.

Gerry

P.S. As proof of my “leave it alone” rule, I also wanted to update the Hubspace integration in HA which I had not allowed to be updated for a long time. After the update it did NOT work as reliably as before and I also had to use an R2 restore to get back to reliable operation. I will notify the integration author but leaving it alone would again have been the right thing to do.

5

Hi Daan,

But I didn’t get the red error message while the bad entities still existed in various activities. I could go between the activities without the errors, but of course some of the Hubspace operations did not work. It was when I deleted the entities that I got the error message. I would have understood getting the error messages when trying to go to an activity with the bad entities in it but it was the opposite that happened!

EDIT: Now that I think of it I deleted the bad entities in the R2 list of allowed entities coming from HA. But those entities were still existing in the activities themselves. So I think your are right. But my workaround of just leaving those bad entities alone and coming up with a new HA script and button seems to work so that’s good enough for me!

Gerry