Rachio 3 Not Responding in Homekit (Again)

Three Apple TV 4k’s. No HomePods. Two of the ATV 4k’s are WiFi-connected. One is wired.

I’ve forced the R3 to move between our two APs and forced the HK “server” to switch between each of the three ATVs. The R3 has remained associated with HK throughout.

Seems consitent with Rachio’s findings. The more hubs one has, the higher likelyhood Rachio won’t stay connected. We have 10 HomePods and 4 Atv’s and the longest Rachio stayed connected was around 3 hours. Crazy that they haven’t figured out how to fix this.

This is the first I recall number of HK hubs being a factor.

One participant in this thread mentioned number of HK devices (lighting control, IIRC) seemingly influencing his.

Briefly describe your wireless LAN, please?

Concur. One would think they’d have had some kind of handle on it by now.

One might be excused for beginning to suspect it’s something perhaps in the WiFi chip hardware, which wouldn’t be under their control, that can’t be fixed.

The multipole HK hub issue was mentioned a couple weeks ago in the " Official HomeKit Update Thread (Part 2)"

My network is very simple, I have two Google Nest routers meshed together. nothing is hard wired. I have over 100 HK devices, must are Wifi, including two logitech circle view cameras which are notorious for dropping off, and all my devices work almost flawlesly. I get a no resposne error about once every few weeks from a single device, typically one of the Logitech cameras.

I’m also thinking that it is hardware related too. I find it impossible to believe that “firmware engineers” (f they truly are engineers" are incable of fixing this.

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I am exactly in the same boat. It will not appear in HomeKit at all. It works fine otherwise, set up programs, can run manually with the app, installation was a breeze. But just like you, I bought this particularly for Homekit compatibility. I’ve reset the thing three times, all sorts fo network changes, even contacted tech support. They say, we are working on a firmware update that should take care of it. Crazy thing is, even the updates in that thread aren’t really saying anything. “Working on the firmware, can get it to replicate, we are reproducing the error.” By the way, what zone number did you get?

I upgraded all my Apple devices to the current public beta version of the OS - my iPhone, iPad, MacBook including my hubs - Apple TVs and HomePods. This was 2-3 days ago. Since then my Rachio 3 has been rock solid in my Home app with no disconnects.

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I think I spoke too soon… woke up this morning with the dreaded ‘no response’

Well so much for hoping that the next update would fix it :frowning:

Indeed. Very disappointing. I’ve had this controller for over a year now and have had no luck using it with HomeKit. By the looks of it, hundreds if not thousands of others are having the same issue. I am surprised it is still being advertised as HomeKit compatible.

I just gave up, been using the Homebridge solution and its been working fine. If Rachio ever gets it fixed I will be back. Based on the updates from Rachio I am not terribly optimistic, they have been rather vague and useless IMHO.

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I have to completely agree with you…

I just can’t understand why mine works so perfectly. Completely freaks me out. What is different about mine? And if anybody asks what mine is I’m not going to answer because I’ve done that a million times before… It just works. And I don’t even use it. Ever… very strange but whatever makes this work evidently is the secret sauce and it’s somewhere in my network if somebody wants to try to find it :joy::joy:

I personally believe it is because I use a Synology Router. I just updated to the newest Wi-Fi six Synology router and that one works with Rachio3 perfectly too… Go figure

The true test will be when I buy another Rachio and along with my previous router install both at my office irrigation. I will bet $1000 that it will work in a completely different environment too

This ^^^^^^ is me, precisely. In fact I was just thinking, this morning, of removing our R3 from HomeKit and moving the app back off to a corner, somewhere, because we don’t use HK for anything anymore.

I only brought HK out of storage and re-added our R3 to test connectivity. Well, it’s been nearly three months (I re-added our R3 to HK on May 17) and… <checks…> it’s still there. It’s been there, and been working, every time I checked. This is through multiple brief power failures, forcing the R3 off one AP onto another and back again, and forcing the HK server to switch. Just started-up a zone that has an area freshly-seeded two weeks back. It’s running and the zone is updating the remaining time in HK.

I guess I’ll leave it for the entire three months and then remove it and re-retire HK.

Today, I watered my dog using my Apple Watch. Sometime it just works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Jon.

Nice to see they are getting somewhere. Hopefully they can resolve the issues without new hardware

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8/25 update says " This will, unfortunately, require considerable regression testing once task heap sizes are adjusted"

In terms we can understand, this issue won’t be fixed for the 2023 season :thinking:

And it sounds like if they can’t allocate enough memory for this either they will have to defeature something to get homekit to work or to release a new product.

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Mine has been rock solid since I put everything on static IPs and also turned off IPv6 in my gateway.

My network is a bunch of old Apple Airports all hard-wired to the gateway. I’m actually adding a 5th one in one spot that has weak WiFi as soon as it arrives from eBay.
Screen Shot 2022-08-28 at 5.00.05 PM

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Well, it’s been over three months and our R3 remains connected to HK.

Even after yesterday, when the power got all kinds of wonky as storms came through, going on and off several times. I later noticed the R3 was off-line. I pulled the plug, counted to twenty, plugged it back in, and it was back on-line. I just checked HK now. The R3 is there and working through HK.

Experiment completed. I’ll now re-retire HK, as we don’t use it for anything.

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The same holds true for me. I just wish it did for everyone…

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Oddly mine reconnected after a power cycle after I made a lot of changes to my network.

On one side of my house, the wifi was weak so I added another Airport Base station and also moved another base station to my garage. Had to run ethernet cables to both these rooms and accidentally drilled through the main ethernet cable that connects the two sides of my house.

Not wanting to have to pull a new ethernet cable I instead put a new end of the cut cable and added another hub to connect the cut cable to new cables.

So after making major changes to everything the rachio went offline but power cycling it put it back online. I’m amazed that I didn’t have to re-add it manually.

No idea why mine works so well now as it didn’t for a long time.

I have everything on static IPs and have separated the 2.4 and 5 ghz into two separate Wifis plus turned off IPv6.