I've got five Ikea Tradfri USB repeaters for my Xiaomi/Aqara hubitat. Over the last couple months, three of these have dropped offline (taking out multiple Xiaomi devices at the same time).
The only commonality to these three is that I had devices (Wyzecams) plugged into the passthrough USB port.
So, this is just a correlation at this time - but I've stopped using the passthrough USB connectors on these repeaters and will monitor their staying online.
Thanks for the heads up. I have multiple Wyze Cams and multiple Ikea repeaters but have not tried plugging a cam into one of the repeaters. Now, I am definitely not going to do it.
What is the max output of the USB port on these devices?
I looked for this morning and could find information on Ikea's website. The indicate the input is 5 VDC (duh!) and the output power is 3 dBm (presumably zigbee radio), but that's it.
You mean output? There should be something on the label of the device for what the output rating is.
No, I meant input. There's was a rating on the power supply for the repeater. But the docs that came with the repeater only indicate that the input voltage is 5 VDC. I couldn't read anything on the repeater itself.
But it plugs into mains power....so, the input of the device has to be 120 VAC, right? Maybe that is referring to the signal repeating part of the device only. And I was able to find this on the Ikea website.
The USB adapter provided with a Wyze cam also outputs 1A.
So, if the signal repeater and the USB outlet are sharing that 1A, that means that you've been pulling over the suggest max output of the AC/DC converter in the outlet.
Yup. And thanks for finding that document. I couldn't find it on Ikea's website when I looked.
Edit - shows you how "carefully" I looked!
Under Assembly & Documents:
That is an extremely strange way to document that though. I would have thought they would have documented the available max load of the usb port, not of the power supply inside. How do we know how much current the signal repeater draws so how do we know how much is available for the USB port? Very odd.
That is really strange. You’d think the 5V 1A current rating would be isolated from the Zigbee draw in the documentation.
I wonder what the actual draw of a Wyze is. If it’s 1A then it seems like shipping the cameras with a 1A PSU is a little underwhelming...
I'm willing to bet that if you're in Night Mode with the IR LEDs on that it's probably close to 1A. I tried using a cheap PSU that I had laying around that was rated for 1A but really delivered something like 700mA and the camera wouldn't stay running.
One other possibility is wifi interference.
Could be. Except it has only happened to the three that I had Wyzecams plugged into. And while I thought I had five of these, turns out I have six.
I meant the Wyze cams are causing the Wifi interferences to your Ikea plugs. If you have a long USB extension cable. You can try moving the camera away to test. I am curious to see the result as I am thinking of getting some of these for repeaters as well but seem like a waste just for running empty.
Oh - that's an interesting idea.
I'm testing both:
a) Leaving camera by a repeater that had fallen off but on a separate power supply.
b) Moving another camera away from another repeater that had fallen off.
Also checked, the camera's power supply is also rated at 1000mA @ 5V.
Ah, so just to confirm, you're not saying that the cameras were killed by the IKEA repeater, you're saying the camera dropped off the WiFi or froze and you had to reboot?
I had a couple of Switchmate outlets that I was using to give cloud access to some Switchmate switches, but found that every time I plugged one in, a day or so later it would cause my front door Wyze cam to go offline. I'd reboot the Wyze, but the cycle would repeat until the Switchmate outlet finally went offline itself. Then it wouldn't cause an issue any longer. If I moved the Switchmate outlet far enough away from the Wyze cam, it didn't cause a problem. But for this reason, I just don't use the Switchmate outlets anymore.
Neither. What happened is that the repeaters that the cameras were plugged into dropped off the zigbee network. The current theories are:
I have an Iris plug within 3 feet of my Wyze cam and it repeats for half a dozen devices without problem. I doubt the radio on the Wyzecam is strong enough to interfere with anything.
I see. Yeah, maybe the draw is too much.
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