Home Assistant APP now really unusable

NSPanel Pro
1

Hi everyone.

Am after a little advice as am slowly running out of ideas and paticence.

I started with HA and Sonoff panels about 18 months ago after rebuilding my house and going 100% in on a smart home. When i say all in, i mean all in! No light switches, nothing else in the rooms apart from a NSPanelPro panel. I have 120’s and some 86’s. About 13 so far with about another 12 to go.

When i first started the integration into HA from Sonoff wasn’t there and i was jailbreaking them and installing NSPanel Tools etc. When i did this the panels were responsive, fast and i had little problems.

Since Sonoff have started to support HA natively i have come onboard with this and gone down the route of F-Droid and the new way of running HA on a NSPanelPro.

As new versions have rolled out, the performance has just got worse and worse to a point now that the panels are not fit for purpose. Buttons are unresponsive, tabs on the dashboard take about 10 sec to show, the whole app is just way too slow. I have factory reset panels which has made no difference.

The HA APP on our phones (Me, wifey and kids) and other Android tablets that i have around the house run perfectly, no lag, delay etc.

When i take a look at the memory and processor on the panel its always very low (less than 10%) and the built-in sonoff interface/software is very responsive when i use it to get to f-droind/settings etc so i can only think that its the HA APP that has the problem.

Ive checked that the panels have a good WiFi connection and that there isnt anything causing interference on the 2.4Ghz band.

Am now just lost.. wifey and kids hating my decision to build a smart home, and ive tried all i can.

I would like to think that i have good tech skill having owning my own IT company (Wifi specialist) for 20 years so would like to say i am comfortable with tech and faulty diagnostics, but this one has me for sure!!

My only assumption is that the panels now do not run well on the panels after the extra functionality has been added over the last 12 months… i love new features but not at the expence of performance.

Im considering replacing them for the new GEN2 but replacing 13 panels will not be cheap and i feel that i shouldn’t be in this position. My solution was working and with subsequent software revisions its now not… Ive ordered 1 Gen 2 to do some testing..

Tell me what you think i need to look at.

Thanks.

2

@Milk should i raise a support ticket? What do you suggest.

Thanks

3

Hi, I was just about to reply to you.

Based on your description, my guess is that you may have set a wallpaper or are using a relatively complex dashboard in Home Assistant. NSPanel Pro has 2 GB of RAM and 8 GB of storage. When the Home Assistant app loads, it may need to retrieve data and configurations for all entities. If you have many devices and a complex UI, this could put considerable pressure on the NSPanel Pro and cause it to run slowly.

If the slow loading is caused by insufficient RAM, I can’t guarantee that NSPanel Pro Gen2 will perform significantly better, as it still has 2 GB of RAM—the main upgrade is the storage capacity, from 8 GB to 32 GB.

To help us investigate, could you record a short video showing the issue and send it to me privately? Please also submit the NSPanel Pro logs. We’ll check whether they contain any useful information and see if we can find a solution.

4

Thanks for the reply. Appreciate it.

Ive had the same dashboards since the beginning, when i used to jailbreak the device and they worked a charm. Could it be that as more functionality has been added to the underlaying OS this is taking up more resources? Ive seen the OS improve with lots of amazing new features so this must come at a cost?

Ive also noticed that if you decide to change a setting on the panel and use the side button to get to the setttings, make a change and then to back to “APPs” to get back to HA, it seems to launch the HA APP again from fresh? So my question is, did it close the old HA APP that i had opened before i went to the Panels settings? Or has it opened up another copy of the HA APP and now you have two running..??

I still say that when i check processor and memory they are less than 10% each time…

i have some videos and will send them to you.

thanks for your support..

5

The issue you are facing is the volume of state updates your HA server is higher than your panel can keep up with. The Sonoff NSPanel devices are awesome but the RK3326 SoC is from 2018 and equivalent to an iPhone 6 and HA dashboards expect something more modern. There is a solution with the free ha-paneld Android app to show HA dashboards that solves this exact problem. You can find it on github and it has tons of NSPanel specific documentation to make all Sonoff panels fly on Home Assistant.

6

Thanks for the advice, ill take a look and report back. Thanks

7

You can find the ha-paneld home page on Github. It is an open-source project and aimed not just at end-users but panel producers that are serious about Home Assistant support. On an unknown device, ha-paneld probes the hardware for known patterns that are then exposed to HA.

Fully supported panels can be characterised with a well documented profile file and it is hoped these will be provided by both the community and vendors. I have already built a default profile for the Sonoff range but would be very happy if Sonoff was to officially sanction their own.

8

Good Morning

Ok some positive news… Having done some research and learnt why i have so many entities and it appears that i had thousands of legacy bluetooth tracking entities from legacy Bluetooth beacon integrations.

This is the outstanding bug - https://github.com/home-assistant/core/pull/175413

In my configuration.yaml was

device_tracker:

  • platform: bluetooth_tracker
  • platform: bluetooth_le_tracker
  • track_new_devices: true
  • track_battery: true

bluetooth_tracker = classic Bluetooth legacy tracker
bluetooth_le_tracker = Bluetooth Low Energy legacy tracker

These integrations added thousands of entries into the /config/known_devices.yaml file which was about 50Mb in size! These all showed up as entities.

Once these intrgrations were removed the the /config/known_devices.yaml deleted and recreated, after a system reboot the entities reduced to 3500.

I belive the new way to track bluetooth devices is with the iBeacon intrgration.

Now my dashboards now run much better, they arent perfect as they have a small lag, but they are now totally “usable” again.

I still want to see how i can improve the performance of my dashboard and im hoping that HA will add some sort of filter to the companion APP in the future to filter out unused entities.

thanks

Mark

9

Hi Mark20,

This issue sounds very familiar to me. I had NSPanel Pro from early release and found NSPanel Pro lag getting worse with each update and buttons on screen becoming unresponsive, eventually becoming unusable. Exactly the same issue you are seeing, albeit I never used HA.

I went through to Sonoff support to get this resolved. In the end it turned out to be a compatibility issue with the mesh WiFi system I was using and the fix was simply to connect the NSPanel Pros to a non mesh WiFi signal directly on my Router. All of the issues were resolved and the panels have been extremely reliable since this change.

Other Sonoff devices can stay on the mesh WiFi and will still work fine as long as both Mesh and Router WiFi are using the same internet connection. The NSPanel Pros dont need to be on the same WiFi connection as other devices. The issue here is that Sonoff NSPanel Pro is supporting 2.4 Ghz WiFi which is starting to show its age. The Gen 2 panel supports 2.4Ghz and 5 Ghz so is less likely to have this issue.

Trying the above may improve your performance further. Good luck.

10

Thanks @waynewillis88 for yoru info.

I agree, they need to move off of 2.4ghz and onto 5/6ghz asap. I have 1 new GEN 2 panel and it is noticably faster than the GEN1 despite simular specs. i would be more than happy to pay 200 bucks if they had a decent processor and ram as this is about the cost of a small android tablet anyway.

Having worked in WiFi industry for many years i can defo say that mesh networking can be tricky as there is no real standard for how its implememted on a consumer level and therfore someof the communication can get blocked/lost over hops.

Thanks for the info

Mark

11

Hi Mark20,

Agreed. I changed my mesh system recently but have still kept the NSPanel Pros directly on the Router WiFi. Before the fix, I got to the point where I was about to throw all my NSPanel Pros in the bin, so I understand your pain! Since fixing this, with all the new upgrades they are amazing and far beyond anything I expected when they were released.