Seeking a Solution for controlling a slew of Sonoff switches

[TriLife]

Greetings from Colombia,

I have our new home wired for automation and have about 70 Sonoff circuits to control. They are located in four clusters, with Wifi APs next to each cluster. Each cluster is on two 110V phases, one with a UPS backup for emergency lighting. The firewall and APs are reserved for the Sonoff only. No other traffic on them.

Things were going well as I was adding switch after switch. They talk to Google home etc.

Then the Firewall, Cisco RV110W, which assigns the IP addresses started crashing. Speaking with Cisco, they say that these SOHO units cannot handle that many clients.

I tried, reserving IP addresses, tried having the APs assign the addresses (dividing the pool of 255 among the four), etc. No use. Sometimes it works for a couple of hours, then it crashes...


An alternative would be to buy a VERY expensive Enterprise router, like the 4331, but for that price I can almost replace every switch with a Aeotec Z-Wave. And, as we're heading into the 5G and wifi6 era, I'm not reluctant going that route...

Has anyone encountered/solved this problem?

Thanks

 

[TriLife]

Hello there,

Here's in update on this situation:

I connected the APs directly to the ISP provided Huawei fiber gateway and it seems to have no problem to handle the 70 Sonoffs. Not a permanent solution, since I have no control over this unit, bit it shows that it's not the Sonoffs causing the problem...

 

[pete_c]

Here tinkering with SonOff devices upgraded with Espurna or Tasmota firmware and controlling the devices with MQTT - HomeSeer and or Home Assistant.
 
Works great with many options.  I did have issues initially with the built in SonOff firmware.
 
Originally tested these devices with baked mini travel wireless routers with OpenWRT.  Now they are on another testing wireless access point called Ruckus and working well.
 
Using Espurna firmware you can statically assign the IP addresses rather than using DHCP reservations.

 

[TriLife]

Thanks Pete_c,

Tasmota and MQTT is in my future as well, but I need to finish and move I to the house first. This will be my first integration. Do you think a Raspberry pi 3+ is powerful enough to manage 70+ switches and a few more HA tasks? Thanks

 

[pete_c]

Yes the default Sonoff cloud connection is a tad slow.
 
Do you think a Raspberry pi 3+ is powerful enough to manage 70+ switches and a few more HA tasks?
 
yes

 

[linuxha]

Hmm, this is an interesting topic. I have my DHCP done under a local server (not the AP or the FW, which are separate). This allows me control of the addressing and DNS.
 
I'd expect a lot of consumer devices to have table issues (memory reserved for things like arp tables, MAC tables, etc.) My FW is a slight low end business router but it seems to handle the tables well (it has a command line so I can poke around). I do have consumer APs and no where near the 70+ WiFi devices. But I've also split my home into multiple APs (I dropped the power).

 

[linuxha]

Thanks Pete_c,

Tasmota and MQTT is in my future as well, but I need to finish and move I to the house first. This will be my first integration. Do you think a Raspberry pi 3+ is powerful enough to manage 70+ switches and a few more HA tasks? Thanks

Yes the Pi will be fine. I'd expect it can handle the MQTT, the DHCP, DNS, and a few other things just fine. I don't trust the SD card for logging but there are ways around that.

 

[TriLife]

Thanks Pete_c, Linuxha,

I found a couple of cheaper FWs, a TP-link ER6020 ( 5 ports) and the Cisco RV435p (16 ports with 8 PoE). This might work work for my needs, and I can wait for WiFi6 APs to come down in price. My Cheap 300MPS APs will continue to be reserved for HA, since there's no heavy BW required.

I look forward to migrating from the ITEAD server to MQTT. Is there a good beginner site, which can walk me through the steps?

Cheers

 

[pete_c]

Originally just read on MQTT via the Wiki then plunged in and started to utilize it with HomeSeer and Home Assistant.
 
Years ago here utilize xAP and xPL as a mechanism of transport for home automation.  The HomeSeer MQTT plugin is very similiar in appearance to the xAP plugin written by the same author many years ago.
 
You can also install a Mosquitto server right on the RPi.
 
The Espurna firmware provides you help with talking MQTT.  Here is an example for RGB lighting control in Home Assistant
 
light:
  - name: ESPURNA_KitchenLED1
    platform: mqtt
    state_topic: Kitchen-LED1/relay/0
    command_topic: Kitchen-LED1/relay/0/set
    payload_on: 1
    payload_off: 0
    availability_topic: Kitchen-LED1/status
    payload_available: 1
    payload_not_available: 0
    brightness_state_topic: Kitchen-LED1/brightness
    brightness_command_topic: Kitchen-LED1/brightness/set
    rgb_state_topic: Kitchen-LED1/rgb
    rgb_command_topic: Kitchen-LED1/rgb/set
    color_temp_command_topic: Kitchen-LED1/mired/set
    white_value_state_topic: Kitchen-LED1/channel/3
    white_value_command_topic: Kitchen-LED1/channel/3/set
 
Here also use RPis for this or for that.  Relating to small footprint Linux servers here went initially from the RPi2 to:
 
1 - dual CPU mini cube computer called the XiS - they are out of business today but there computers live on as they were well built
2 - Pine 64 2 Gb computer - low power small footprint computer
3 - Little TVBox computer today with an Octocore ARM CPU, 3 Gb DDR3-4 RAM and using 32 Gb built in eMMC.
 
The Little TVBox comes with Android loaded on the eMMC.  I wipe that out and replace it with Ubuntu 18.04 64 bit.
 
This is a tinker toy for me as current WiFi / MQTT stuff is.
 
Primarily still using X10, UPB, Zigbee and ZWave automation inside of the house. 
 
Sensors are all hard wired to the OmniPro alarm combo panel. 
 
The big automation box is using a Haswell chip set computer with 16 Gb of DD3 RAM doing Ubuntu 18.04 64 bit plus using Oracle Windows Virtual boxes for a speech today.
 
First things first is to get your dependencies OFF of the cloud for your automation. 
 
IE: when using cell phone or a tablet for automation outside of my LAN here use VPN only.  I am tinkering with Amazon Alexa devices and Samsung Smartthings hubs here but have no real automation dependencies on these devices (with two ISP connections here).  IE: still utilize local lan touchscreens here.