Rachio 3 Not Responding in Homekit (Again)

I gave up on trying to fix this. *Mine just works and I hate it that others are having problems…

I keep an eye on this thread that I started 2-1/2-3 years ago and I really don’t think this is something the community can fix. It is simply up to Rachio… Life is too short to worry about these kinds of things for me.

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[spot check: Today my Rachio is: ONLINE]

I’m using a mix of assorted eero hardware. I have most of the fancy features turned ON, though the HomeKit feature is in a screwed up state at the moment - eero thinks it’s on, Home app doesn’t. I’ll mess with it next time I’m feeling brave.

Jon.

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Hmmm… Sensing a pattern, here :wink:

Me too… everything in my network works all the time except my Rachio, which has intermittent HomeKit functionality.

I’m really not going to let you tell me that my Wi-Fi hardware should take the fall for Rachio’s flawed software. Eero is pretty mainstream, and at least their support people keep me up to date with my queries (enabling eero DDNS with Google Fiber before you get on your damned high horse about how there’s problems with my network). If you want to defend Rachio’s flagrant incompetence, go ahead, but you’re the fool if you do. Or in their pay.

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Have it your way. It’s no skin off my nose ¯\(ツ)

Hallelujah!

“The Apple team has replicated the issue on their Rachio controllers. Our teams are working together to analyze the logs. We will be meeting next week to review next steps.”

Hopefully they will share what they found as I would love to know in addition to it getting fixed.

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Now that “The Apple team” has replicated the behaviour we’ve all had for months and months, hopefully this issue will be fixed once and for all.

In the meantime I’ve added my Rachio to my Hombridge server and I’m joining @Macsterguy’s “mine just works” club :grinning: Not the ideal scenario, but it will do for now


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Welcome to the Club!

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Hallelujah!!!

Ok. So I’m in the functional club with 632 and UniFi non-mesh access points.

Mine worked for months, then dreaded no response in HomeKit yet fully functional in rachio app.

Was digging through this thread and tested a new UniFi feature, not sure when it showed up, and when I clicked manually add accessory in HomeKit it actually showed up in HomeKit! Entered my pin and boom!

In UniFi controller v6.2.26
Settings>wifi>Select wifi name(mine is a shared 5/2.4)>edit>advanced>Optimize IOT wifi connectivity

I turned this on for both. It reprovisioned the AP’s and instantly worked.

IF your on UniFi. Give it a try.

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Glad you got it sorted-out.

Could it be your Rachio 3 <-> HomeKit connectivity went away about the same time that feature was added to your UniFi AP(s)?

BTW: I recommend against using the same SSID on both 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks. It’s been my experience band-steering usually creates more problems than it solves–particularly in multi-AP networks.

That update came out months ago so I just don’t know. None of my other HomeKit stuff has an issue so I think something finally happened like a power cycle or whatever that caused the issue to manifest.

Thanks for the feedback on the separation. I think the biggest culprit here is the fragility of the HomeKit integration on rachio with lots of contributing factors that should be non issues, but are.

Thanks for steering me into the unifi config to overcome this.

You’re welcome.

I’m trying to find out what the option actually does. Tried searching on it every which way and came up bupkis.

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It appears to set DTIM to 1. You could of course do this manually on each AP. But it appears this is a blanket setting.

There might be more it changes, but that’s what I found in a thread on the UniFi forum.

Interesting. Yeah, setting DTIM to 1 is all anybody’s found it appears to do.

It would seem Rachio 3 owners weren’t the only ones to have experienced “issues” following one of Ubiquiti’s UniFi firmware updates. And others found changing that setting solved their problems, too.

What I don’t get is why this should be so, unless one of their firmware updates set DTIM to an inadvisedly high default value.

Whatever the case: Ubiquiti has a bad habit of arbitrarily changing things in updates without warning their existing user base they’re doing it. That’s one reason I switched-out our UniFi AP AC Pro for an EnGenius AP and why I’ve always been very, very careful about applying firmware updates to my ERLite-3 router.

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Is this an option only if you are using the same SSID for 5 and 2.4? I have an SSID for 2.4 only and don’t see that option. I am also on 6.2.26.

EDIT: Found it in the UniFi app on my phone, not sure if its just me but I dont see the option to enable this in the web GUI.

@alexrodriguez you are correct. I logged into the WebUI for my unifi controller and this option is NOT visible there. It is only visible via the IOS app.

As an update…we had big storms last night and everything lost power. Rachio came back online with no manual intervention and is working in HomeKit. So this setting DTIM=1 either directly on the AP’s or via that IOT unifi setting, definitely overcomes the challenges in the rachio implementation…but rachio does need to get this update out the door. The science experiment of getting this to work has been like getting really awesome at changing a spare tire…

Its probably overkill but my home hub (atv) now also has a DHCP reservation in the unifi controller also.

Thanks for the updates, @dane

As we can’t comment any updates in the updates forum I’m copying it over here so we can comment on it.

I’m actually getting hopeful.
I’ve finally got mine working to the point of not having to add it back in, but it still drops off of HomeKit but fixes itself now.

I do hope they share with us what the problem was.

daneCS Manager @ Rachio

1h

08/06/2021 Update

Incorporating a new Apple Development Kit (5.3) into the firmware. The Apple engineering team is recommending this as it might correct the disconnect issues customers are experiencing.

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That sounds promising