I am very new to SmartThings and was also interested in the Osram Lightify bulbs, so I contacted their engineering group for clarification. I have no idea why the bulbs would repeat for some people and not others, but according to their engineers, the current intended behavior is to repeat all Zigbee ZHA signals. For reference, the following is my question and their response:
Hi. I am interested in your smart connected lights, specifically the Lightify tunable white bulb, the Lightify color RGBW bulb, and the color RGBW LED Flex Strip. I have a question. When connected to a Zigbee ZHA network hub, do your smart connected lights ārepeatā signals from all other zigbee devices, or just from other Osram bulbs? I searched for this info online and I found one person that said your bulbs DO repeat everything, and another person said they tested it and found that your bulbs DONāT repeat other Zigbee ZHA signals. Please let me know the true answer to this question. Thanks for your time. (PS: I am in the United States, in case your bulbs behave differently depending on the country itās sold in.)
Their response:
Hello Jason. We sent your request up to the Lightify engineering group for evaluation. They sent me back a comment this morning addressing your question. The reply was:
We recognize that people want to use Lightify lamps as routers and fully support that functionality. All of our bulbs and fixtures (both US and European products) act as routers for all ZigBee devices in the same network, not just for our own products. This means that routers and sleepy devices from other companies may send messages through the Lightify bulbs and they will be ārepeatedā as expected. The reason that for the confusing results is that routing in ZigBee is complicated: route selection rules vary from device to device and the RF environments are constantly changing. There is no doubt that a Lightify bulb will forward a message for another device, but itās hard to predict when and how the other devices make the decision to route through the Lightify bulb.
I hope this addresses your concern appropriately. If you need additional assistance please let me know.
I double checked my system since I could have sworn that I had seen the bulb repeating messages a while back and it looks like mine is still repeating messages. If you look at the sniffer log, you can see the sensor (device 8657) sending a message to the hub (device 0000) indicating that I opened the door in the middle frame. The bottom frame frame, you can see the details of the message where the sensor is sending the message to the bulb (device d2dc) and the bulb is immediately forwarding the message to the hub. Just after that, you can see the hub sends an acknowledgement through bulb followed by some commands to the bulb.
Great stuff. Thanks for sharing!! I have seen my Hue bulbs both relay traffic as well as allow a child (battery powered device) attach to them. The child device Iām not 100% sure but pretty sure (strong 90%) its been awhile since I played with that.
For clarity, we should mention that JohnR is referring to some Hue bulbs which he has connected directly to the SmartThings hub, not to a hue bridge. (Also verified by a network mapping tool.) Thatās a whole different topic.
I bought the Lightify Soft White A19 bulb at Lowes the other day. Itās pretty much the same as the Tunable White one, without the color temperature adjustment.
Pros: The light is nice and even. It reports attributes correctly (keeps SmartThings in sync if controlled by another ZigBee device) and ZigBee groups work fine. It supports optional dimming for on/off. I confirmed that it acts as a ZigBee router.
Cons: Dimming the bulb to minimum turns it off, just like the Tunable White one; so itās not possible to know if itās off, or just dimmed to minimum. It turns on instantly, but turning off it dims down over one second; the Tunable White does not do this.
In conclusion I think this is the best general purpose ZigBee bulb, for the price.
Cree didnāt properly implement ZigBee attribute reporting, and also used the wrong device ID. They are not reliable, one of mine just stopped working and Iāve heard that others had the same problem.
I emailed Cree to see if they had a firmware update and rather than reply with at least a form letter they didnāt reply at all.
Just some neat observations for posterity. I found a shortcut for anyone trying to update the firmware on their bulbs using the Osram Gateway.
I wanted to upgrade the firmware on my bulbs so that a physical off preserves the state when they turn back on. This is a great feature and I am surprised the bulbs didnāt ship with this to begin with. In any case, I had to sync each bulb via the Osram Gateway to do this.
The Gateway itself is a pain to setup, but I did not have to remove the bulbs from the SmartThings Hub to do this. They were disconnected from the Hub, but I didnāt have to muck around with the Smartapps and all ā they just became unresponsive.
I have all of my LIGHTIFY switches on z-wave toggles, because people in my house like to use the paddles as much as the automation. There is a further benefit in that I can use the switch to factory reset the switch with a quick script I wrote: https://github.com/KristopherKubicki/smartapp-osram-reset/tree/master
Once the switches were factory reset, the Osram Gateway paired them, and then I did the firmware updates.
Using the reset script, I unpaired the switches and included them back into the SmartThings Hub. The lights blinked and the inclusion process said āIdentifyingā but never asked to configure. This is because I already had the bulbs included from before and did not need to redo all the configuration. The bulbs just worked from then on.
Thanks for the tip! Did you have any luck with them preserving their state after a physical off once back on ST? My understanding is that the firmware update allows you to set a new ādefaultā via the Lightify App, and will come back on to that particular ādefaultā, not that it will come on to the last known state.
@johnconstantelo updated his bulbs to try and get this feature, but found that resetting/pairing with ST overwrote the setting; so theyāre back to coming on 100% and warm white. Weāre trying to figure out how Osram was changing the ādefaultā; but I fear they do another firmware update to embed it directly into the bulb. If only we could get both hubs on the same zigbee network and poke around with a new ādefaultā active.
Yeah - @johnconstanteloās experience has been mine as well, unfortunately. Iām guessing there is some kind of new command class that sets the default with the new firmware. Given Osramās support with other parties (like Wemo), Iām guessing they would be very open to share it. They really have done a great job with the LIGHTIFY line
thanks for the great thread, iām just getting started with automated lighting and have a question about how you all are using the lightify bulbs.
iād like to have a setup where the color temperature somewhat follows the day and to have a couple modes to bring down the brightness during the evening and to be very dim at night. it looks like the lightify lights can do that, just with their own hub, but i donāt see how the switch on the wall will allow for the bulbs to get the programming changes over time. additionally, from what @Kristopher and others are reporting, a hard on/off is resetting the last known settings.
is there a light switch that works with smartthings that will send a software based on/off to the bulb, which would turn off the light, but leave the bulb powered and connected to receive updates/instructions?
thanks @JDRoberts, thatās an interesting thread. it sounds like what iām looking for doesnāt quite exist, this would be my ideal:
push-button or touch for on/off via automation
hard on/off for the power to the bulb/fixture (could be very small, only needed in case the bulbs need to be reset or just powered off in case of issues)
options - slider for dimming via automation, slider/buttons for scenes
i bought some flic buttons, so those might be my short term solution, it seems like these new smart bulbs have added a wrinkle that the manufacturers havenāt really thought through very well.
