Aqara temperature/humidity sensor bricked

[gkgeorgiev]

Has anyone experienced dead Aqara sensors? In my case, i had two Aqara temperature/pressure/humidity sensors but they both stopped responding completely. I've checked the batteries and tried with new ones, but without any luck. No signs of life and they've been working for about two years.
My two theories are - either hardware got damaged due to high humidity (bathroom) or some firmware update that bricked them ( don't remember if i triggered any updates though).

[lux73]

have you tried to delete (force) the Sensors from z2m and completely new pairing it?

[lux73]

then i would assume they are defect - last thing you could try is to replace the battery ^^

[gkgeorgiev]

Yeah...i did that already... Probably have defected....but what puzzled me is that they've been working for about 2 years and they died at approximately the same time 🤔

[lux73]

very strange two devices dead same time ^^

[Shred99]

Take the battery out, short across the battery contacts to drain any capacitor that may be in parallel with the battery, then leave the battery out for a day or two. Try re-pairing it then.

I've had some of the newer Aqara sensors appear to die and not come back after changing the battery, re-pairing etc etc. Completely resetting them as a above has fixed it.

[sampatz07]

how did you do this?

[gkgeorgiev]

All of the above didn't work for me 😔 ..now i have 3-4 bricked sensors

…

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[scottgasch]

Open the battery panel and look at the battery contacts. Check whether the one in the middle is sticking up enough and, if not, bend it a little. The one on the side should be in the recess and not bent over -- if it's bent over it will contact the front of the watch battery and not the side. In my case the latter was the problem -- I must have somehow bent the contact when messing with getting the sensor pulled off the surface where it was sticky-taped up. Once I fixed the contacts the sensor "unbricked" itself. Hope this helps, good luck.

[gkgeorgiev]

So far, I've tried the following

1. Replacing the battery
2. bending the metal plates for better battery contact
3. hard-resetting by pressing for 10-15 seconds while inserting the batter
4. trying to empty the capacitors by keeping the reset button pressed, without a battery
5. shortcut of the two battery connectors
6. And yes - it's not the humidity since all except one are in my living room and Zurich climate is not that humid

Non of these worked.
The weird thing is that the same happened to sensors of different providers - Aqara (temperature/pressure/..) and Tuya (PIR and light sensor). Also I'm not a low-voltage specialist, but wondering if the Wifi 2.4/5GHz networks or my 5G router could somehow interfere or induce some electricity that could also fry the circuits. So far there are 5 sensors dead and I start wondering whether they could be somehow fried by the protocol (overloading some sort) So far it's sensors only. All power connected zigbee devices are working perfectly.

[rudelm]

seems unlikely. But interesting that others are having this issue as well with their Aqara sensors. Out of 10, one is now completely dead. I don't think its a Zigbee2Mqtt problem though but rather a hardware problem.