Exchange the board and then you can spend all the time you want to test it more.
I’ve invested far more time in this than any customer should be expected to do. I also have above-average technical skills. Before retirement, among a list of certifications, I was a Cisco Networking Academy Instructor, CCNP-CCAI certified.
Just sent you a return label via email. I will take a look at this board when I get it back and report back here what I find.
Will you be shipping a replacement board as per the requested exchange?
Haven’t gotten your return board back yet. I wanted to try to identify the problem and make sure that the replacement doesn’t experience the same issue compared side by side. We wouldn’t want you to have the same issue.
You clearly don’t understand customer service or the concept of an exchange replacement. You should study how Amazon does it. You have demonstrated nothing to me except suspicion and arrogance in dealing with your customer The customer may not always be right, but they are still your customer. You have done nothing but inconvenience the customer with test after test and now time. It has already cost both of us more in time than this one board is worth. I am not your research department nor do I care how much time it takes YOU to identify the problem. You can exchange the board then take as much time as you like to do your testing.
When you ship, I ship.
Hi Tim,
I am genuinely trying to get to the root cause of your problem and solve it. I’m very disappointed that our genuine intent seems to be lost on you.
When a customer approaches us with a unique or unknown problem, we make every effort to identify the root cause of the problem. By the nature of this highly technical device, there are many confounding factors including the devices connected to the product, the customer’s network/WiFi characteristics, and the 3rd-party smart home platform (i.e. Home Assistant) that can contribute to actual or perceived technical problems. Our troubleshooting process intends to identify and isolate the actual problem, and in the majority of cases, with appropriate troubleshooting, we can solve problems after a brief technical information exchange.
There are certain classes of problems that are already known to us based on our experience supporting this product (and previous iterations) since 2017. The problem that you presented here in this thread is not one of those known potential issues and therefore requires some additional troubleshooting or investigation to identify the root cause – which may or may not be a problem with the device itself. That’s what I’m trying to determine since you offered to send it back for an exchange.
I saw the 1-star review that you just posted on Trustpilot which makes me even more disappointed. Here I am, personally trying to attend to your issue (in a public forum, nonetheless) after my technical support rep exhausted all of our standard troubleshooting steps, in my opinion showing a great deal of goodwill.
As of yesterday when I was last in the office, we hadn’t seen your return come back yet. When it does, I plan to personally inspect it and try to reproduce the problem that you’re describing. This should only take me 20 minutes or so, and we’ll ship you out a replacement the same day. I also plan to personally flash ESPHome firmware on the replacement board that we send you, since I believe that our ESPHome firmware build will serve you better with your Home Assistant setup. If there is an issue with the WiFi chip on the device, it’s important for us to find out how to identify and mitigate so this same issue doesn’t affect other customers.
Or, if you’d like, you can use the same return label to return your purchase for a refund.