DSC-BRAIN USER GUIDE · TROUBLESHOOTING

Hub offline or not reporting

What the room does while the hub is dark, reading the link chips, Wi-Fi and fallback-hotspot causes, and when a takeover is what you are seeing.

●  verified for 9.0.0 · firmware train 8.2.0.0

●  last verified 2026-09-17 · mirrored 2026-09-15

What is happening to the room

The hub keeps running its ladder from the last targets whether or not the brain can see it. The brain, after 45 seconds without a fresh hub reading, forces every Sonoff relay OFF; after 3 minutes it raises hub not reporting (critical) and stops judging frozen readings. So a dark hub means: fans and the 2×4 lamp follow the hub, the four climate plugs are off.

Read the chips

  • HUB LINK DOWN with Up still counting: never trust the Up chip next to LINK DOWN.
  • HB # is a tick count, not hours.
  • RECONNECT OVERRIDE / PENDING RE-ASSERT: the hub did reconnect, while manual takeover was on. Turn takeover off when done.

Likely causes, in order

  1. Wi-Fi. The hub roamed to a weak access point or a mesh node on another channel. Lock it to one BSSID (Settings › Network › Lock Wi-Fi AP) and use a fixed 2.4 GHz channel.
  2. The hub is on its fallback hotspot after losing the network (it shows as a DSC-Setup-* SSID). Fix the network, or flash-hub-fallback from the Pi.
  3. The brain just restarted. Two-minute rejoin window.
  4. Power. Check the hub's supply and the panel's ESP-NOW link (the panel goes blank without it).
  5. A firmware job is flashing the hub (Settings › Devices › Firmware shows it). Wait for the job; the brain leaves the hub's session alone while its job is queued or running.

Check from the Pi

docker logs --tail 200 dsc-hub-brain

Look for the hub's API session lines. Each device has one persistent ESPHome session; a session that stays down for 45 seconds is restarted, and each further restart waits twice as long (30 s, 60 s, 120 s … up to 8 minutes) until a connect succeeds. The log line reads session looks dead — restarting with the wait before the next try. A hub that answers ping but not the API needs its API key checked in the seat drawer.

After it comes back

The brain re-asserts Want unless takeover is on. Acknowledgements keyed to the previous hub boot clear.

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DSC-Brain user guide · Hub offline or not reporting · this page is edited on the site; the Notion original was retired after the mirror