This caused me a lot of pain with the ESPHome devices continually throwing up their own access points and refusing to join the wifi. I had full control of the devices when I could get them connected using Home Assistant – ESPHome Builder. The steps along the way that I took were:
- Separate my WiFi in to an IoT 2.4G network and a 5.0G network for the house. This allows me to simplify the WiFi as much as possible and I think stops the Smart Connect from causing issues.
- Turned off everything I could in the 2G network to keep it as simple as possible. I am not sure how much was neccessary but it is working perfectly now and I don’t want to backtrack.
- Set wireless mode on the ASUS to “Auto” and tick the “Disable 11b“.
- Add this section to esphome > on_boot in the ESPHome builds for ESP8266 devices (I have many smart sockets). I could always get them to connect straight away if I rebooted my WiFi:
esphome:
on_boot:
- priority: -100 # Use negative priority to run AFTER WiFi initializes
then:
- lambda: |-
#ifdef ESP8266
wifi_set_phy_mode(PHY_MODE_11G);
#endif