Trying to revive Aqara leak sensors

[dumbhome22]

Woa! Somehow I missed the reply notifications. I am very interested in your help. Thanks for being patient with the replies.

@orangebucket

How are you defining the ‘last reporting time’? What is the status of the sensors in the IDE (account.smartthings.com)?

Here is an example of what I see in the IDE:

Current States	
battery: 100 %
water: dry
checkInterval: 7320
lastCheckin: 2019 Jul 13 Sat 5:46:21 AM
lastCheckinDate: 1562996781000

Status	OFFLINE

Last Updated	2020-02-24 6:40 AM EST

List Events (All)
No events found matching this criteria

@orangebucket

There is a bit of a non-sequitur there. Many Zigbee bulbs are repeaters.

@MinerJason

As already mentioned, most zigbee bulbs are repeaters. There are a couple of exceptions like Sengled, but not many.

My bulbs appear as SYLVANIA Smart 10-Year A19, and after I read this, I kind of wrote them off as not being useful:

@JDRoberts

Note: OSRAxM LIGHTIFY bulbs have a known firmware issue that can occasionally cause them to fail as ZigBee repeaters. This can potentially cause other ZigBee devices to fail to update and/or respond.

For what it is worth, I just checked every ZigBee device in the IDE and each had “Next Hop” listed as “Home Hub (0000)”.

Does that mean what I think it means? I do not have any functioning repeaters? With regards to the Osram firmware issue that JDRoberts mentioned, if there is a firmware fix, while troubleshooting I realized that I have firmware updates disabled. Is that something that folks recommend to turn on? I am generally skeptical about updates when things are working, but in this case …

Finally, with regards to re-pairing, thank you for the explanation MinerJason:

@MinerJason

Yes, you can start the pairing process over again, and as long as you don’t delete the device first it should retain the zigbee ID so that you don’t need to re-build any automations using them. IME they will sometimes pop up as a device during the re-pairing (with whatever name you previously assigned them), and sometimes nothing will appear to happen but they’ll reconnect. My point is that once you’ve gone through the re-pairing process don’t start over if nothing pops up. Wait a few min and log into the IDE and check the device status there and it will often be functioning properly again.

I followed the instructions that worked for me originally (first-time setup):

@ArstenA

When you hold the reset button down, as soon as the LED flashes, the device has been completely reset and goes into pairing mode. 3 seconds is about right from everything I’ve seen, but really what you should do is hold the reset button in until the LED flashes and then stop pressing the reset button. This should all of course be done after you’ve selected “Add A Thing” in your SmartThings mobile app.

After that initial LED flash, there is a pause, and then you’ll either see the LED flash once (a long flash), or it will blink 3 times (short flashes).

If the LED flashes once, pairing was unsuccessful, and you should short-press the reset button to “wake up” the sensor to try pairing again. The LED will blink as you short-press the button, and after a pause it will either flash once (a long flash) or quickly blink 3 times. If it flashes only once, short-press the button again, and repeat until you see the LED quickly blink 3 times.

When the LED blinks 3 times, the pairing process has started, and you will see a “catchall” message appear in the hub event log in IDE (in My Hubs → List Events, not in the Live Logging window).

Then, if you already have installed a correctly working Device Handler for the Xiaomi device in your IDE, a zbjoin message should appear in the hub event log shortly after the catchall message, and that’s when you’ll see the device show up in your SmartThings app, ready to be renamed.

However, because these are battery-powered “sleepy” ZigBee devices, the pairing process may not complete, so the best advice (based on a post by Ted Tolboom on this Athom home-automation thread) is to continue short-pressing the reset button every 5 seconds, even after you see the LED blink 3 times, until the pairing process is complete (and you see the device appear in your SmartThings mobile app.)

But I was not sure if any interaction with the app or IDE is necessary. When I followed ArstenA’s process (just the button presses, skipping any IDE work), I monitored the device status after several attempts and it still reads “OFFLINE.”

Thanks for the help! I think I have a handle on notifications this time. I look forward to the replies.