TLDR; The Waveshare RS485 to wifi adapter does not seem to be a substitute for the EW11.
Maybe not an issue per se, more of a warning to others.
I have a working ESP32 with an RS485 converter that publishes data to Home Assistant via ESPHome. It successfully reports all the statuses — temperature, pumps, time, etc. — but I can’t control anything from HA.
Rather than reworking my ESP32 setup, I decided to try using the bwalink approach. For that, I used a different RS485-to-WiFi device (a Waveshare model). When the bwa mqtt bridge starts up, I see a message saying it’s “sending the config request” but everything after that just shows messages “discarding data after xxxxxx.”
To troubleshoot, I used netcat and od to inspect the data stream from the Waveshare device: nc <ip_address> 8899 | od -tx1 -An
I'm not an expert with the protocol but it seems to show properly formatted message — they start and end with 7e, just as expected.
However, the communication still doesn’t seem to work correctly. A packet capture shows that BWA is sending data to the Waveshare device and receiving ACKs for that data. But BWA does not apparently get the correct response data.
I’m not sure what’s going wrong here. When I put my ESP32 setup back in place, it immediately started reporting status again with no issues.
TLDR; The Waveshare RS485 to wifi adapter does not seem to be a substitute for the EW11.
Maybe not an issue per se, more of a warning to others.
I have a working ESP32 with an RS485 converter that publishes data to Home Assistant via ESPHome. It successfully reports all the statuses — temperature, pumps, time, etc. — but I can’t control anything from HA.
Rather than reworking my ESP32 setup, I decided to try using the bwalink approach. For that, I used a different RS485-to-WiFi device (a Waveshare model). When the bwa mqtt bridge starts up, I see a message saying it’s “sending the config request” but everything after that just shows messages “discarding data after xxxxxx.”
To troubleshoot, I used netcat and od to inspect the data stream from the Waveshare device:
nc <ip_address> 8899 | od -tx1 -AnI'm not an expert with the protocol but it seems to show properly formatted message — they start and end with 7e, just as expected.
However, the communication still doesn’t seem to work correctly. A packet capture shows that BWA is sending data to the Waveshare device and receiving ACKs for that data. But BWA does not apparently get the correct response data.
I’m not sure what’s going wrong here. When I put my ESP32 setup back in place, it immediately started reporting status again with no issues.