Detection of ring control panel offline

[calisro]

At times my Ring control panel will go offline (no wifi) and need a quick reset to fix it. I've created a ping to the control panel to alert me but I was thinking this may be something that others will need. There is no way otherwise to know other than the motion detectors not working that the ring control panel is only in mobile data mode.

What do you think if having a control panel sensor with the state of it tracked that we can alert on? If not, no big deal as it can be done through other automations but the average person might not even know its an issue.

I see the state maybe being a boolean and perhaps attributes being the cause (wifi down, running on battery, etc)

[tsightler]

I don't really understand the request. Every device already has a status topic (online/offline) and the device should definitely be offline if the Ring base station (I assume you mean base station when you say control panel) is in mobile data mode or otherwise not connected. Why would another sensor be needed? Also, I wouldn't have any way to know why it's offline because, well, it's offline.

[calisro]

Sorry I didn't explain this well.

At times the base station can lose it's wifi connection. The wifi light on the unit will turn orange. It will then fallback to 3g Mobile. At this point there is no way from a home assistant point of view to know that the base station is disconnected from wifi. The only symptom from home assistant is that the motion sensors and contact sensors no longer report status. They will only report in the event the alarm was actually armed and it was triggered. Then the API would report the trigger.

This is actually the same with the ring app. Within the ring app (which I really don't even use anymore) it would send a push notification saying the base station was offline. But if you had notifications in the ring app setup to notify on Motion events, it wouldn't report them either while the base station is on Mobile and not connected to WiFi.

I realize this addon really only talks to the API so the base station status is somewhat out of scope directly. My concern though is if the base station is disconnected from wifi, there should be someway to tell in home assistant.

I set up a ping monitor to the base station ip address so I'll know if it's offline. But in reality I think it would be good if there was a way to detect this with the addon so the end user knows without having to resort to an external monitor (like ping platform) to tell.

Maybe these events are available in the API. I'm not sure. If they aren't, optional detection on the local network would be nice if possible.

Hope it explains it better. There was no change in statuses when it was disconnected from wifi. If I turn it off completely it will change it's status.

[tsightler]

My concern though is if the base station is disconnected from wifi, there should be someway to tell in home assistant.

My confusion comes from the fact that you keep saying there is no way to tell, but if the base station is disconnected from wifi it should absolutely be marked as "offline" in Home Assistant so a notification based on this (base station "offline" for more than x seconds) should be already possible. If it's not going offline when the base station drops wifi that's a little surprising to me, but it's been a long, long time since I've messed with it.

Personally, if my base station was going offline with any regularity at all, I'd probably be looking for another alarm system as it would not be a behavior I would tolerate. In 3.5 years of owning my Ring alarm I've never had to manually reboot it to restore the wifi connection.

[calisro]

I've had it happen a few times. It's annoying but the system still works when that happens from an "alarm" point of view over the mobile network. So it's really just an annoyance and impacts my other use of the motion detectors in HA.

I believe the "offline" flag on the base station only comes into play if it's completely down (not contactable via mobile AND wifi) but happy to check again. The only other way is via the "base station wireless" which reports the strength of the wifi signal. It would be a little difficult to use that as you'd have to check for a null value.

[tsightler]

When the base station is on cellular backup it's not contactable via the API, it basically just becomes a dumb hub that will monitor devices locally and use the cellular network to notify Ring monitoring if you have a monitoring plan. All "smart" functionality available via the API goes away when operating on cell. The devices should go "offline" in this case, but it's possible that this isn't happening for whatever reason as it's not something I specifically test especially since it's not something I specifically test.

I can promise you I won't be adding in local monitoring as there's no expectation that ring-mqtt runs on the same network as the Ring alarm. However, if the device does not go into offline state when operating on cellular backup, I would consider this a bug.

[calisro]

I recreated the issue by putting it on my guest network and then turning off it's wifi. It behaved as if all was okay. No errors. No devices offline. Wifi signal and all just stayed the way they were when the wifi went offline for hours. Would you please look into this as a bug and see if there's anything we can do about detection for this?

I let it sit like this for hours just to see. This addon logs just simply didn't have any new entries as if there was no activity. The comm-status reported okay but last update was hours ago.

[tsightler]

I assumed the API would report the devices offline since they can't be reached, but, based on what you've written above, this isn't true. I'll have to investigate what the API actually returns in this case and see if I can detect this as an offline state. It could be quite a while though as I don't have much time for this project right now and it's just not very high on the priority list.

[calisro]

I get it. We all do. My home grown ping monitor will do at the moment as crude as it is. Should I create an issue from this discussion or just leave it here for now?

[tsightler]

No need to open an issue, I'll keep it in mind. Hopefully it will be fairly easy. Honestly, thinking about it, I probably need to re-test the entire online/offline feature for all devices. Right now it's basically just a global status based on the websocket connection for the site being up/down so it doesn't properly update for other offline sensors either as it's work that I've just never managed to get to. I probably need to try to detect and properly online/offline those as well.