I plan on using my Pixelblaze V3 with the Hubitat Pixelblaze Driver for home automation. In my area, power outages are common and it would be great if the board came back up with the same IP on the wifi every time, instead of potentially a different DHCP-assigned one. The settings of the driver on the Hubitat require I enter the Pixelblaze’s IP, hence if I could use a static IP I could set it and forget it in the case of a power outage. For my purposes I can’t use AP mode, everything has to be on the same network/subnet.
I don’t believe the board supports static IPs yet, is this a use case that’s been considered?
Are you able to access the control panel for the wifi access point it will be connecting to? There should be a way to tie the pixelblaze’s MAC address to a chosen IP in it.
Agree! Static IP, using your router’s DHCP server is the way to go here. That’s how I run mine.
(I’d have built discovery by MAC address into that driver, except that the Hubitat’s driver model is single threaded and very sandboxed - it won’t allow me to run a separate thread to listen for the Pixelblaze’s beacon datagrams. If this ever changes, I’ll fix it so you just have to give a MAC for your Pixelblaze and it’ll find the IP on its own!)
Actually, @wizard, good idea! I probably can - just have to set up permissions to let me phone the outside world from the driver. Will look at this over the next couple of days.
Interesting: This is the kind of thing I just don’t think of because my own home control setup is completely, adamantly local.
I got into home automation early. There were quite a few cloud outages, bad automatic firmware updates, cloud vendors going completely out of business and basically bricking their devices, etc. So I went “no cloud allowed”, and never looked back.
Ok, I’ve just updated the Hubitat Elevation driver (now v2.0.5) to give the option of using the discovery service to find Pixelblaze IP address by device name. I thought that’d be easier to find and remember than the MAC address. In any case, a static IP is no longer required (but will still work, of course.)
To use:
update your Pixelblaze device driver to the new version
set the device name in the hub’s “Device Information” section to be the same as the name on the Pixelblaze Settings tab (don’t forget to press the “Save Device” button)
enable “Use Pixelblaze discovery service” in device preferences on your hub. You can leave the IP address blank, or enter your birthday, or whatever. It’ll be replaced on first connection with the “real” IP from the discovery service.
The Pixelblaze driver will then retrieve the IP address from the discovery service as needed when connecting, and you will (hopefully) never have to worry about the IP address changing again!
(@wizard, this shouldn’t generate too much additional traffic. Once it gets an IP address, it keeps the same address for subsequent connections as long as it works. Only if it fails to connect at an IP address does it go out to discovery to look for a new one.)
