Had an accident here at home and Homey landed hard on the floor. Still seems to be doing quite well. The upper part and some pieces of plastic came loose. The antenna for the ZigBee came loose but I was able to reconnect it.
I started Homey and everything seems to work. Later in the evening we discover that 433 mhz is not working. I open Homey carefully and see that the spiral antenna has come loose. We find it on the floor…
The error code we get when we try to start a 433 mhz device is: “Timed out after 30000ms”.
Do you think it’s just a matter of soldering the antenna back again?
However, I wonder a bit about the error code, can the error code indicate that something more may be broken? I thought that 433 mhz works in such a way that Homey sends e.g. the “on” signal for a device and then Homey doesn’t care anymore? Somehow Homey has to recognize that something is wrong otherwise the error code would not appear?
Homey has been running for almost two days since the accident, only with a reboot for the 6.1 update.
I’m not very keen on buying a new Homey just to get 433 MHz running. Waiting for the next version first.
The lack of the antenna will be the problem. The range is now zero. You could try to bring a 433 MHz device very close to Homey. Then when it switches again, you have your answer. I think soldering the antenna will fix the problem. The error message will come from the fact that Homey can no longer connect to the 433 MHz devices.
There is no such thing as “connecting to 433Mhz devices”, Homey just sends a signal and hopes it will be received.
I don’t think the timeout is a sending error, I think it’s a “communicating with the 433Mhz microcontroller” error. Sending signals without an antenna attached can sometimes cause hardware issues (because an antenna act as a load, and when it’s not there the RF power may get reflected back to the transmitter).
So I would suggest trying to re-attach the antenna before trying to send out a lot of signals.
