I have many of these devices and have had great success adding and keeping these sensors successfully connected to my v2 hub. I recently added Samsung Wifi and can no longer add any of these devices to my system. I have tried using the classic app as well, pressing the button on the sensor many many times and standing very close to the units. Everything I did in the past no longer works after adding the samsung wifi boxes. The appropriate hub led’s blink, the log says “No devices to add”, no catchall. Nothing. I expected a more robust system instead of this…does anyone know what is going wrong? Are these devices simply incompatible now?
Xiaomi and Aqara devices are only known to work - with some significant caveats - when connected to SmartThings v2 and v3 hubs.
The Samsung WiFi hub runs different firmware, so there’s no guarantee that they will also work with it.
However, Xiaomi / Aqara devices are only guaranteed to work with Xiaomi / Aqara gateway hubs, and because they don’t follow ZigBee standards 100%, it’s really just a matter a luck that they work with SmartThings v2 and v3 hubs at all.
I still have the original hub that worked very well. It is still connected to my system yet these sensors will no longer add to the system. Why would that be now that I have simply added the wifi boxes. The old hub should still connect these sensors?
The hub has limited number of end device that it can connect with. I do not remember the limit. It is not a big number. I am guessing installing WIFI hub is just coincidental with hitting this limit. You may want to do a quick count on how many zigbee device you have in the mesh. With that count information, a member here can confirm whether you may hit this limit assuming you have no Zigbee router devices.
If you do not have any zigbee router in your mesh, I think potentially new end devices cannot join the mesh. Adding a zigbee router (typically DC or main powered Zigbee devices) may help you.
As to options for Zigbee Routers, I make my own that double up as Environment sensor. From time to time I have some to share with members here. Most, if not all, Zigbee outlet is a Zigbee Router. Some Zigbee Bulbs are Zigbee Router. Xbee can be configured as Zigbee Router as well.
I have thought about the limit but I also believed that by putting in the mesh wifi hub I would be increasing the limit for zigbee devices. I thought the network would be stronger as a result of this mesh wifi device not troublesome. Is the Samsung Mesh Wifi not also a zigbee router? Also, these devices were already on the network but at the periphery of the house so would occasionally drop off and I would have to rejoin the devices. It always worked until I added the samsung wifi and in part, ironically so, I added this wifi because these two devices were dropping off.
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I’m sorry, I misunderstood. I thought you had replaced your v2 hub with a Samsung Mesh Wifi hub.
I don’t have any direct experience with the Samsung Mesh Wifi hub, but I can say a few things:
The Wifi Mesh hub is another completely separate hub from your v2 hub. As far as I know and from what I’ve read, they operate independently. The Wifi Mesh hub does have Z-Wave and ZigBee radios built-in, but those Z-Wave and ZigBee networks will be separate from the Z-Wave and ZigBee of your v2 hub.
So although you have increased the limit of ZigBee devices overall, those two groups of ZigBee devices are on separate systems that don’t automatically communicate with each other.
No, it is not. It is a ZigBee coordinator, and there can only be one coordinator per ZigBee network. Think of the coordinator as the master of the ZigBee network; all ZigBee end-devices and/or ZigBee router devices are registered with it.
Also, although on some channels they share the same frequencies, WiFi (2.4GHz and 5GHz) mesh networking is totally different and separate from ZigBee mesh networking. Adding Mesh WiFi devices do not improve ZigBee network strength, but in fact can potentially reduce a ZigBee mesh network’s strength due to interference on certain 2.4GHz WiFi channels.
You should be seeing two hubs now when logged into IDE or in the SmartThings app. Maybe you are trying to pair the Aqara sensors to the new hub, and it just isn’t compatible? It may help to contact SmartThings support to figure this out.
Well this is figured out. Apparently there must be a one to one relationship between locations and hubs. When I added the WIFI I included it under the current location instead of creating a new location. So, even though the setup defaulted to this it causes problems when adding devices. The new app even has a method of selecting the hub you want to use but believe me it does not work very well, at least when multiple hubs are associated with a single location. Architecture seems crazy to me but at least it is now working.
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