I have been testing this for the past weeks and I can say that there is some magic behind the scenes that I can’t understand.
I’m trying to find solutions and I like nuki products, but fault is definitely on the Nuki’s side, not on the wireless vendors, in this case, unifi.
I have a network with 50+ devices and every single time a network config changes, a reboot is made, etc (even just rebooting the SL itself because I had to charge the battery) will result in a long period of no response from nuki’s side.
It happens on both my Nuki bridge connected to a 3.0 standard and my Nuki 3.0 Pro directly connected to the wlan.
It doesn’t matter how you play with the settings for dtims, uaspd, proxy arp, basic data rates (actually, the auto just so you know, applies the minimum so manually setting to the minimum is the same).
I’m on the latest stable, and from my tests these are the conclusions that I made:
Smart Lock 3.0 Pro
- Everytime a minor change in the network happens that results in the AP provisioning, it will throw the nuki’s into the reconnect loop.
- sometimes rebooting the nuki fixes it, but most of the times doesn’t. It may take 1 to 5 reboots to fix it. Sometimes going into the nuki WiFi settings and removing the network and joining again, fixes it.
- if for some reason the lock doesn’t stay connected to the AP for more than 5 minutes, you better reboot/fix it, it will be hard for it to stick on its own.
- as soon as it crosses the 10 min uptime in the AP, it will be 100% online working as intended, no disconnections or whatsoever until you reboot it or change any network config.
Nuki Bridge
- same behavior of the pro 3.0 with the difference that it remains online in the AP but it doesn’t connect to the servers.
- while you can’t reach nuki in the nuki app, you can through MQTT or webhooks (funny, isn’t it?)
My guess: nuki has a really hard time reaching the nuki servers when it boots or lost connection (disassociate from the AP) and it starts going havoc into a non recovery process. Typically the bridge recovers on its own after a few hours, but the pro doesn’t.
So bottom line is: nuki understands a lot of locks, but it’s really bad on networking so it seems. Again, I don’t have any other similar issue on all my other iot devices, some of them are even cheap stuff from AliExpress that I’d expect to work worse than premium smart locks.
I’m getting tired of working around this issue for a long time now, but I’m too lazy to search another lock vendor and sell my nukis. So I guess I’ll have to live with it and hope, with all the respect, that Nuki engineers hire someone that understands networking or find a fix. I’m sorry to put it this way, but I think you’ll understand the frustration.
Edit: Just to add an example of my lock today:
Basically yesterday I changed some network config (not related with the Nuki network) but since the AP had to re-provision, it dropped the Nuki connection like I’ve described. Then, it start its “re-connect loop” until today earlier this morning, I went to it, removed wifi, removed mqtt, removed battery, re-added battery, wifi/mqtt etc. played a bit with it and it got connected. As soon as I saw it was connected for more than 5 minutes, I knew it would stick. Now it’s more than 2h up and I know, that unless I change anything in the network, reboot the AP/lock, it won’t disconnect and it will be fully green 24/7. It has been like this for the past 3 months or so but it’s really limited that you have to deal with this struggle whenever a network change or reboot to lock happens. To prove my theory, I can post a screenshot tomorrow and it’ll be full green.
