Use Bridge without an active tibber account - solved! (was: Bridge is restarting every 15minutes)

[nhulsch]

Hey all,
when the bridge is not paired with tibber and running in local mode only it is restarting every 15 minutes and the LED is flashing in all colors.
Does anyone know how this behavior can be changed? I've tried to play with the watchdog and mqtt parameters but had no luck.

Best regards,
Nils

[marq24]

no clue - but why you want to run an "unpaired bridge" anyhow?

[nhulsch]

just for reading the values of the meter as the pulse is imo the best on the market with their own radio protocol to the reader. the average month price is also better for me than the hourly, so its not paired with tibber

[marq24]

but you have paired the 'pulse IR reading head' with the 'bridge' ?! (no clue how this can be done without the TibberApp - and without beeing tibber customer)

[nhulsch]

yes, head is paired with bridge. you can either pair the node in the webinterface or do it with the tibberapp but remove the bridge afterwards from your account (i have done the latter)

[marq24]

so basically "all" is working - except that after 15min the bridge starting a light-show?

[nhulsch]

basically its working yes, sometimes the homeassistant addon receives a 404 but I think thats because of the startup progress. i just like to have things working properly and not rebooting all the time as i also don't know if its good for the lifetime of the esp.

[PhotonSpheres]

Any news on this @nhulsch ? I am in the same boat and would love to use the Pulse purely local without any App in the background.

[nhulsch]

Nothing new on the reboot "issue" but the integration handles that fine. The 404 issues i described in other comments are because of a faulty meter (needs to be replaced)

[nhulsch]

I had some time and fixed the issue for me, but it requires that you configure your own mqtt broker as there is no workaround if the bridge doesnt reach any mqtt.

by default it is configured for ssl encrypted mqtt broker, but passing the client certificate and key to the params they get garbaged and cannot be used, so we need to clear that values to fallback to unencrypted connection.
for unencrypted connections there are no implemntations for an authentication, so your mqtt broker needs be running without any authentication too.

overview of the required params and their ids

mqtt_param:
   5  ca_cert
   6  certificate
   7  private_key
   8  mqtt_url
   9  mqtt_topic
   10 mqtt_topic_sub
   11 mqtt_port
   12 mqtt_valid
   23 mqtt_pause
   42 mqtt_client_id

use the console as you cannot clear params with the params page.
5, 6, 7 needs to be cleared to disable encryption
8, 9, 10, 11, 42 needs to be set to your choice
12 needs to be true
23 needs to be false

If you make any mistakes with 12 or 23, you may lose connection from your bridge to your wifi and it will continue to run on its own accesspoint. you can fix it the direct connection then.

commands i used

param_set 5 ""
param_set 6 ""
param_set 7 ""
param_set 8 192.168.1.10
param_set 9 tibber/in
param_set 10 tibber/sub
param_set 11 1883
param_set 12 TRUE
param_set 23 FALSE
param_set 42 tibber

store these parameters with
param_store

and reboot your bridge to take effect
reboot

Your bridge should now connect to your mqtt broker and and doesn't reboot after 15 minutes anymore.
Side effect that happened to me, that the OTA process never started due to the "failed" state and it updated the ir-reader and bridge for me (took some time and some reboots).
This HA integration is still functional with the current firmware, but Tibber removed a bunch of params from the params tab and you will have to access them via console. In case use param_list for more information of possible params after upgrade (nothing has been removed or added, just hidden from the params ui page)

[marq24]

You solved this challenge at the end - congratulations! ;-) But I guess this would be only an option for ex-tibber-customers who still want to continue to use the existing hardware for the meter readings? Or is the alternative hardware (e.g documented at volkszaehler (https://wiki.volkszaehler.org/hardware/controllers/ir-schreib-lesekopf) really that bad?!

[nhulsch]

i don't know about volkszaehler as i dont have any space or even outlet where the meter is so i'm forced into a wireless solution.
meanwhile there are other solutions like iometer.de but they are even more expensive than the tibber pulse.

[marq24]

120,- € - die spinnen doch die Römer! :-D

[UDicke]

before becoming a tibber customer I used powrpilot. Although it was developed for a comfortable homematic connection, it can also be used with json queries. I will go back to this solution when I leave tibber.