I started playing with openhab at the end of last year and learnt a lot. I have the openhab MQTT broker set up with a static IP address and a few wemos controllers successfully talking with openhab via the broker.
We have a few weak/dead wifi spots in the house and I’m considering a mesh network system like the TP-Link Deco M5. It looks like it plugs into the router and one then turns the wifi on the route off. However, I’m not sure this will work with the openhab set-up and I’m wary of spending a lot of money on a mesh network that is not compatible. As an example, it seem impossible to set a static IP address on the Deco M5.
Will the static IP address of openhab on the router be picked up on the network?
Will this not interfere with the IP address that the mesh network want to assign?
Any other reason the MQTT broker could stop functioning?
Personally, I have an orbi mesh network. But all the usual networking stuff like DHCP and routing and such is run on a pfSense box so the WiFi are simple access points.
But I’m pretty sure that the Deco M5 works the same way as the orbi does. In that case than you would replace your router with the Deco M5 main router and let it do all your routing and DHCP and such or your configure the Deco M5 to be in AP mode where it doesn’t provide any of those services and relies on your existing router to provide them.
So your questions really only apply if you replace your existing router with the Deco M5. If you put the Deco M5 into AP mode and plug them into your existing router, your existing router will continue to control the IP address leases and such.
I depends on how you deploy the Deco M5 and how you assigned the static IP address. It appears that the Deco M5 supports address reservations so you would just configure it to assign the same address to the openHAB’s MAC address (assuming you are not in AP mode).
When in AP mode, the Deco M5 should not be assigning IP addresses. If you don’t plan on using AP mode, you should completely replace your existing router with the Deco M5.
Despite some Google results, it seems the Deco M5 can do address reservation: https://www.tp-link.com/za/support/faq/1795/ I wonder whether this includes a LAN connection but would think so. One looses a lot of features of the M5 when using AP mode.
Hey @Musashi, just stumbled on this thread - this may or may not be relevant to you anymore, but I can confirm that the Deco M5 works with OH and supports IP address reservations, at least on my system which is admittedly somewhat simple. I have OH running on a Windows system and don’t use MQTT though, so I can’t speak to your exact configuration. I’m using the M5 in full router mode (not AP mode).
Hi @Marcusfacius. Yes, we got the Deco M5, connected it to the router and set it up to run in router mode. The RPI with OH is still connected via LAN to the router and everything else to the Deco wifi and it works fine.
