Automatic restart ESP8266 with ESP easy

A smart home with issues

Recently, I had the issue where my ZigBee network would die every few days. After a lot of debugging and even re-pairing of all my devices, I came to the conclusion my ZigBee coordinator is nearing the end of its life. Strangely enough, if you restart the device it will work… for a few days. Hence, a quick and dirty fix is to restart the device every day. This is not a solution to the problem, but in case of buggy software or just hardware that is not working well can be a temporary solution.

CC2531 ZigBee with ESP8266 as wireless coordinator

In my case the CC2531 which is my ZigBee network coordinator is connected to an ESP8266 as a serial to wireless bridge. Because of that, I run a piece of software called ESP easy to set this up. In here we can set a rule that will restart the device every x minutes of on time as follows.

Enable rules in ESP easy

1. To enable rules, go to Tools/Advanced and check the Rules checkbox.
2. Save
3. Refresh the page

Go to rules and insert the following code

1. Between Devices and Notifications there will be a rules button

2. Click on the rules button to go to that page

3. Insert the following code

   On Uptime#MUC1_Uptime do
   if [Uptime#MUC1_Uptime]>1440
    Reboot
   endif
   endon
   

4. Save

5. ???

6. Profit

You can change 1440 to the number of minutes you want. After this amount of time the device will restart.

This is not the final solution

At the moment I am designing my own ZigBee USB stick to work with Zigbee2MQTT (Z2M) or Zigbee Home Assistant (ZHA) which both can be integrated in Home Assistant. However due to chip-supply issues the newer sticks based on TI’s CC2652P are mostly out-of-stock as of this writing. Therefore, I will try to create a simple design and sell my prototypes in the Dutch market.