I got a new Wave Radon (model printed in the battery compartment is “2950 Wave”), and it seems to work fine with the Airthings app. But then I tried to connect it to OpenHAB 5.1.4 and had some trouble.
If I try to add it automatically, it shows up as a generic bluetooth device without any of the sensor channels. If I add it manually it as an Airthings Wave Radon / Wave 2, it initially seems to show up fine, and is listed as “ONLINE”, but then it never actually seems to work.
Specifically, the RSSI is the only channel that ever updates (the signal is fine since I have it right fairly close to the bluetooth adapter on my OpenHAB server, about -58 dB with some fluctuation). Furthermore, the status periodically changes to offline with “COMMUNICATION_ERROR Service discovery for device failed” or sometimes “Read data from device failed”.
I’m not really sure how to think about the issue here. I assume this has worked at some point for someone with a Wave Radon, but since it’s not working for me, I’m not sure if the issue is a change in OpenHAB, a change in the hardware/firmware on the device, or some other configuration issue in how I set things up…
I briefly tried to get my Wave Pluses to work with the Airthings binding in OH. I was never really happy with the performance and how I had to deploy it.
My setup was a little different in that I run OH in Docker and getting BT to work in the container is a huge pain. So I ran a separate instance of OH just for this (and Govee).
But the equivalent of the “COMMUNICATION ERROR” happens all the time too. It seems that these devices often just don’t respond or something like that. It looks like they actively reject the requests as this is what I see in the WavePlus_Bridge logs:
2026-05-14 12:59:12 - libs.waveplus[WARNING] - Failed to communicate with device family (attempt 1 of 4): Failed to execute management command 'scanend' (code: 11, error: Rejected)
2026-05-14 12:59:13 - libs.waveplus[WARNING] - Failed to communicate with device family (attempt 2 of 4): Failed to execute management command 'scanend' (code: 11, error: Rejected)
2026-05-14 12:59:14 - libs.waveplus[WARNING] - Failed to communicate with device family (attempt 3 of 4): Failed to execute management command 'scanend' (code: 11, error: Rejected)
2026-05-14 12:59:14 - libs.waveplus[WARNING] - Failed to communicate with device family (attempt 4 of 4): Failed to execute management command 'scanend' (code: 11, error: Rejected)
So I don’t think it’s OH’s fault or the binding’s fault as much as it’s the device refusing to respond. I can’t speak for the lack of Channels though. When I tried to use in with OH all the Channels I expected showed up as expected.
I have a Wave+ that seems to behave similarly after updating to 5.1.4. It did mostly work with 4.3.2. I too have a working RSSI channel (RSSI in the -60s) which makes me think that indeed the newer OpenHAB is different from the old one in a way that makes AirThings devices not work very well. I diffed the addons source code for Bluetooth and AirThings and there’s nothing obvious to me that would explain this change in behavior. Turning the airthings add-on up to DEBUG, it does seem like it chatters at the Airthings device a lot, which I can see how a battery device might decide to just kinda ignore. I’m WAGging that the RSSI is actually coming from Bluez and not actually received data from the Airthings device.
Does anyone who knows more about Bluetooth want to try to help out?
