busybee

In my bedroom I have some SOMA smart shades and a SOMA Connect to control them from HomeKit. This setup works pretty well, except every now and then the SOMA Connect will stop working entirely; being a Raspberry Pi it’s easy enough to hook up to a monitor and see that it’s kernel panicking on startup.

I suspect there’s an automatic update mechanism that simply doesn’t work right.

Anyway, when this happens, the fix is to just reflash the MicroSD card… but this also wipes out all your settings, and in HomeKit that means having to set everything up again, including scenes and automations. Very annoying.

But, if you have a Linux machine (or a Linux VM) it’s possible to save the setting files for later.

1. Mount the MicroSD on a Linux machine
2. Open the rootfs partition
3. Copy the contents of var/soma-connect/ somewhere safe; there should be three JSON files (at least, that’s what was on mine)
4. Reflash the MicroSD normally
5. Remount the MicroSD and copy those JSON files back into the now-empty rootfs/var/soma-connect/ directory (you might have to do this as an administrator)

If all goes well, the device should come back online and HomeKit should see them as the exact same bridge and accessories as before.

Going through a few rounds of troubleshooting with folks on the macOS community forum as well as Apple tech support regarding the SSD overheat issue has helped me determine the following things:

• Whatever this problem is, it’s uncommon; nobody else seems to have experienced it
• The enclosure itself isn’t to blame; it happens on both my Plugable USB 3.1gen2 and on my Sabrent dual-slot Thunderbolt enclosure
• The overheating is only happening on the Crucial 2TB NVMe stick (that normally lives in the USB enclosure); having just the PNY stick (which lives in the Thunderbolt enclosure) doesn’t overheat, moving the PNY stick to the USB enclosure doesn’t overheat, and the Thunderbolt enclosure only overheats if I have both the PNY and the Crucial stick in it
• The overheating stops if I unmount the drive but leave it electrically-connected
• Mounting the drive even under macOS Recovery causes the overheat to occur just as quickly

For now I’ve moved my most critical files from the Crucial stick to my older SATA drive (which isn’t having trouble) so I can continue to work on the things that I normally do on my desktop, and my studio laptop seems to be okay with the PNY+Thunderbolt combination so I don’t think Novembeat is at risk because of that, at least.

This does mean I won’t be able to work on music from my desktop computer in the meantime, and video editing will have to be direct to NAS, which is doable, just not ideal.

Hopefully this all gets sorted out in a macOS update.